Home!

After 6 weeks in London helping to look after my mother I have, at long last, made it back to Portugal. The weeds have thrived, the house needs painting after so much rain and there hasn't been one viewing. I went into Sintra this morning to look for a tile panel to put at the front of the house to make it look more exciting. I went at 9.00 to beat the tourists but they were already pouring out of buses and running around with selfie sticks. Anyway I met a fascinating man who can paint anything I want on tiles. He took me to his mother-in-law's beautiful courtyard garden which had some wonderful antique panels. Sadly, mine will be new, but I chose what I wanted and was even organised enough to have the measurements with me.

For the first few weeks after my mother's fall there was no time or headspace for poetry. I had to drop out of the fabulous online course I was doing with Liane Strauss with The Poetry School as I just didn't have any time. I also cancelled the course I had enrolled in with Kathryn Maris, starting in May. For the first time my poetry mind went blank which was a horrible feeling but I eventually started to do some editing and the muse returned. I entered a competition by Paper Swans Press for poems on Roses at Sissinghurst and was very excited to be highly commended which means my poem will be in their Roses pamphlet, and hopefully read (by me!) at Sissinghurst in June. I've always said I don't write about flowers or love but I also wrote three poems for Emma Press for their anthology on Love. I await the results, but surprised myself by having great fun with these themes.

Poetry Review and Magma were waiting for me on my return so I have plenty to read and I'm also sifting through my latest poems to see which might work together in a pamphlet.

My tile panel will look a little like this one

Wonderland Ekphrasis

I was lucky enough to be in London for a reading of poems written specially for the Alice exhibition at The British Library. The poems were a wonderful and diverse collection and a lot of them were very humorous. Holly McNish had me in stitches. I didn't know her work at all but have now ordered a copy of her book 'Nobody Told Me'. It was a joy to hear Mona Arshi, Robert Seatter and Amali Rodrigo, among others. I was hugely impressed by how beautifully everyone read and it was wonderful to be in London and able to catch this event. I miss this kind of thing in Portugal.

Our Stanza group is going from strength to strength and we have found a beautiful venue for our next reading. We are still investigating but it is in a lovely second hand bookshop called DejaLu in Cascais. The bookshop is run as a charity to help the professional development of young people with Down's syndrome. It would be great to be able to raise funds and/or awareness at the event. We are in the early days of this plan and probably won't think of holding the reading until after the summer.

Meanwhile, I am spending longer in London than first planned, as my poor 96 year old mother fell over and broke her hip on Mother's Day. She is very feisty and progressing well. This morning she was attempting the Times 2 Crossword, 18 hours after her anaesthetic!

Workshop

Ruth O'Callaghan gave our Stanza group a wonderful workshop day in Estoril. For some of the group it was the first time they had ever done a proper workshop and we had a lot of fun. It was a long day, with hard work, but the energy was fabulous and Ruth worked magic.

I'm really happy to have had two poems chosen for And Other Poems which will be posted on Josephine Corcoran's poetry website on March 11th. I've also had a poem chosen to be published in Paper Swans Press new anthology, so I feel very lucky.

Yesterday I had a peek at Visual Verse's picture for February and it was very inspiring so I stuck to the rules and wrote a poem in an hour ... mind you, it's a very short one and could do with some editing, anyway it's up on their website which is great. I write very slowly so this was in record time for me. I love spring, as I have lots of energy and do a lot of writing. It may not be spring in England but it's certainly come to Portugal.

Commas

I hadn't realised that I had fallen into a bad habit of using too many commas in my poems. I never used to, so it has crept up on me over the months. Luckily Helen Ivory pointed this out to me in my last assignment for her course, and, I've been going back over some of my poems to see how bad the damage is. It's not looking good!

On that note, Happy 2016, and my resolution is to 'watch those commas'. I've put a big pink Stickie on by desktop to remind me. It sits next to a Stickie with advice from Jo Bell 'make the first line interesting'.

The picture is of wind chimes made of ceramic bells for sale at the market in Lyon where we had a few days just after Christmas. They were very magical and I regret not buying any. I thought they would probably break on the way home.

I read a beautiful poem the other day on Josephine Corcoran's blog And Other Poems, by Mark Totterdell called Leaf, which has inspired me to carry on ... I didn't know his work but will search further.

Apologies for the randomness of this post. I think it's because I'm trying to gather my thoughts after Christmas and also to get some order back into my life, with a busy few weeks ahead :-)

Newsflash!

I was very lucky to find out that Ruth O'Callaghan has started coming to Lisbon to give residential workshops. She has (brilliantly!) accepted to come and spend a day workshopping with our Stanza group. I'm also going to join in with one of her residential weeks and I'm looking forward to an interesting beginning to the New Year.

Last night I got back from a weekend in Barcelona which was a fun start to Christmas as the streets and squares were full of Christmas markets. It is a fabulous city but I never have enough time. This time I managed to get to the Picasso museum and the never-to-be-finished Sagrada Familia. I've been there before, but it's like a magnet over the city, and draws me in. Next time the Miro Foundation will be top of my list.

It's a quick change of suitcases before we set off for family in France tomorrow. I think it's meant to be a skiing holiday but there seems to be no snow. Portugal is basking in sunshine.

So Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year with lots of Poetry.

La Sagrada Familia

Making Friends!

Yet again I haven't managed to keep up with my blog but I wanted to introduce you to my new best friend from Moniack Mhor. Isn't she a beauty! We had such great weather and such a wonderful group of people that it was a good tonic before the start of winter. But where is winter? It certainly hasn't come to Portugal as we are still having temperatures of 17º in the daytime.

I've just finished a wonderful online poetry course with the Poetry School. This time it was a feedback course with Professor Andy Brown and I got the most honest feedback that I've ever had. He took a lot of trouble with all of our poems and his comments were very constructive. I wish he'd do another course as I'd be first to enrol. Critiquing is a very tricky business; if you're too tough you can put someone off writing for life, but if you're too kind, it just isn't helpful or constructive. The whole idea is to help some-one to improve their writing.

I went to Ireland in October and spent a few days in Dublin which was fascinating. I had only been once before when I was about 17 and only for about 5 minutes. I fell in love with The Book of Kells at Trinity and made a load of notes. I tried to visit as many bookshops as possible and ran all over the place looking for them. The Winding Stair was a treasure trove of books, a lovely place to spent time rummaging around. I was lucky enough to catch a poetry reading (Katie Donovan & Peggy O'Brien) at Books Upstairs, a wonderful shop in an old house with a narrow staircase, beautiful stained glass windows and lots of poetry books and magazines.

I can see that my list of books and magazines needs updating and I promise to get round to it soon. Meanwhile I have an assignment to do for my online course with Helen Ivory and lots of reading to do for the fabulous reading group on Alice Oswald, led by Kathryn Maris. Alice Oswald has been a revelation for me and I think her poem 'Dunt' is one of the most fascinating and beautiful poems I've ever read.

I'm nearly forgetting my most exciting news which is that my poem 'The Lost Art of Speaking Spanish' has just been published in the latest issue (63) of Magma. Yippee!

Bananas!

This is meant to be a blog about writing poetry but somehow the garden keeps sneaking itself in. We have bananas for the second time in 15 years. I've been writing poems about the garden too. I think it's because I've had to spend more time digging and planting since putting the house on the market. Mind you, with one viewing in six months, is it worth it? It has renewed my love affair with the garden, so I suppose the answer is 'yes'.

Summer took over my life with family and visitors so this blog was put to one side. Now September is here, things have quietened down and I seem to have taken on a lot of poetry commitments.

Next week I'm heading off to Moniack Mhor, a writing centre near Inverness, for a tutored poetry retreat with Peter and Ann Sansom. I'm really looking forward to it and have a pile of things I want to work on. I'm going to be going through London just at the time of the Poetry Book Fair so I'm going to go along and pick up some pamphlets. I find pamphlets are a wonderful way of publishing (and reading) poetry and would love my own one day!

Meanwhile I've enrolled on a reading group at the Poetry School for reading Alice Oswald. Kathryn Maris is the tutor, and the first poem she has given us to read is called Dunt and it is quite amazing. A poem like that makes you realise what a wonderful art poetry is. Writing poetry has also taught me to read it, and I wonder what I did with my life without a poetry book tucked into the car, my pocket or a bag, for company.