New Poems Published and 2015 Readings

Norwich, November 2015. Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd


I recently had a couple of new poems published. One of these, 'Beekeeper', appears in the Mexico City-based The Ofi Press and you can read it here: http://www.ofipress.com/aykroydclarissa.htm

The other poem, 'Seventeen Steps', appears in Issue 10 of Lighthouse, a journal focusing on new writing by up-and-coming writers - and ah, the rarer delight of being published in print! You can purchase a copy of this issue here: http://www.gatehousepress.com/shop/anthologies/lighthouse-issue-10/

Both of these recent publications have been poems about (or inspired by) Sherlock Holmes. If this is starting to look like a theme, that's because it is a theme. Watch this space.

Another recently lovely thing was appearing on the list of the Best UK Poetry Blogs of 2015 at Matthew Stewart's highly regarded poetry blog Rogue Strands. You can find me in very good company here, with many other blogs that I would recommend: http://roguestrands.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-best-uk-poetry-blogs-of-2015.html

Finally, here's a list of the poetry readings I gave/took part in this year. I have a couple at least coming up in 2016, which I think will be another good poetry year.

• June - London: reading at Red Cross Garden as a poet-in-residence for the London Open Garden Squares Weekend
• July - Cambridge: reading at The Missing Slate anthology launch event, at the Judith E Wilson Studio
• September - London: reading at Red Cross Garden for their annual Flower & Vegetable Show
• October - London: reading with The Quiet Compere at the Hackney Attic
• November - Norwich: reading at the Lighthouse launch event at the Bicycle Shop

I hope that all poets, audiences and readers had as wonderful a year as possible. 

The Missing Slate: Cambridge to Berlin

First, mea culpa, I haven't been writing in here much. My best excuse is that by my standards I have lately been writing poetry quite prolifically. Given that for the past four years I've often wondered if the blog is simply a giant, elaborate, elegant avoidance technique to keep me from writing actual poems - writing more poetry and less blog is A Good Thing. Also, there's just summer (such as it is) and busyness and all that.

On 29 July I spent the afternoon and evening in Cambridge, where I was one of the readers at the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio for The Missing Slate's anthology launch evening. This extraordinarily international journal - based in Pakistan and with staff and contributors from all over the world - has now published a few of my poems and an essay I wrote on poetry in translation. It was a real honour to be asked to be part of the evening, and in such good company. (Also, we all enjoyed the food and literary cocktails, including The Master and a Margarita and Go Set a Scotch Dram.)

The other writers who were reading included Karen Leeder, Martyn Crucefix, Vahni Capildeo, Hubert Moore, Sarah Fletcher, Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, Fiona Inglis, and Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik. There were translations from German and Polish (and readings in the original languages), poems on everything from the Santiago de Compostela train disaster to the Lampedusa refugee crisis, and much more. Literature editor Jacob Silkstone also reminded us sensitively of the challenges faced in Pakistan by those working in areas such as literature, and paid tribute to Sabeen Mahmud, who was assassinated in Karachi earlier this year. 

Before the evening, it was also lovely to spend a few hours walking around Cambridge. It helped that it was a day of summer sunshine, or at least enough of it. As I was sitting on a wall of the river terrace at Trinity Hall, a punter drew up near me, pointed at me and said to his passengers "See that girl sitting on the wall? Her great-grandmother was the first female Nobel Prize winner. Very impressive." I decided to take this as a compliment. Cambridge feels so peaceful and beautiful, it's hard not to be swept away by it. I also found a public piano in a shopping centre and as there was music on the stand, I was able to spend a few minutes picking my way through a Bach Invention I used to play years ago.

The week of the launch, The Missing Slate published another of my poems, 'Berlin'. This one goes back several years - I think I visited the city in 2008 and I'm sure I wrote the poem not too long after that, although I also revised it a few years later. Berlin fascinated me in an unusual way. I think I've travelled quite widely, but I have never been to a city which I could compare to Berlin. It is unique and it's haunted by all that happened there.

Cambridge, July 2015. Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd

New Poem Published: 'Sherlock Holmes in Red Cross Garden'

Sherlock Holmes, from The Naval Treaty, by Sidney Paget


The Pakistan-based literary and arts journal/website The Missing Slate, who have previously published my work, have just published my poem 'Sherlock Holmes in Red Cross Garden' .

This poem is, of course, one of the four that I wrote for my recent residency with Red Cross Garden, organised by the Poetry School and the London Open Garden Squares Weekend. It was the first poem that I wrote, since Holmes walked into the garden in a very definite way not long after I first visited it and started reading and thinking about it.

I would call this quite a personal poem, though it's hard to explain how exactly. Sherlock Holmes has accompanied me for so much of my life (since I was seven years old, I think) that he has become a part of me in a way I wouldn't say any other fictional character has (and where Holmes is, there Watson is as well, usually). He's led me down so many literary, figurative and real pathways that whenever he shows up, he remains both familiar and fascinating - and also, a kind of mirror for myself.

When I had written the poem I realised that there was an undertone of anxiety in it which surprised me a little. This is not a Holmes in the best frame of mind, I think. He may be preoccupied with the details of an unspecified case, but Watson isn't wrong when he suspects Holmes's preoccupation goes beyond that. I think he is awaiting a confrontation, to come sooner or later, and he is looking for solace amongst the flowers. "What a lovely thing a rose is" is directly from the story The Naval Treaty, in which Holmes speaks unexpectedly and passionately about the beauty and significance of flowers. It is also a passage which indicates that Holmes was no atheist, which in modern times he is often popularly supposed to be. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," he says. "Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers."

New Publications: Aviators and Anthologies

First Flight by Brocken Blue. Used under Creative Commons license



I was recently thinking that this blog feels slightly in the doldrums. Having recently re-read some of my earlier entries, as much as two and a half years ago, I wondered if I had more to say about the poems then. On the other hand, some blogs don't even last this long. And I never wanted to be prescriptive about the content; it can be a bit of everything, as long as there's poetry.

On the bright side, this year hasn't been bad at all (by my standards, anyway) for publishing bits and pieces and for writing poems. I'm very pleased about my most recent publications, for different reasons.

My poem 'As though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul' appeared last month as one of the weekend poems on The Missing Slate. This fascinating arts journal is Pakistan-based with an international staff and outlook. The poem was inspired by this extremely moving account on English PEN of the poet Ivo Machado and the English pilot, which troubled and haunted me from the moment I read it. Sadly, I suppose the missing Malaysia Airlines flight may also have been somewhere in the background, too. Pablo Neruda provided inspiration with the title and the quote.

The other publication actually was the culmination of years of work. In my day job working on the publishing program for LAMDA's examinations in speech and drama, I and some of my colleagues have been developing new Verse & Prose and Acting anthologies for use with the new syllabuses over the next few years. They have finally been published. If there are certain lessons I have learned from working on anthology development, it is that permissions are an absolute nightmare, and you can expect plenty of spanners in the works at the last minute. On the bright side, the new books look great and I think the content is really dynamic and varied. A couple of my poems made it into the Verse & Prose anthology, one of them being 'Andalucia', first published in Shot Glass Journal. The other is a poem called 'London, 7 July' which I wrote just after 7/7 and just before moving from Dublin to London. It is still very reflective of my emotions in the moment and I have to admit that when I see it in print, a part of me feels quite exposed.

The Verse & Prose anthology also features many of my favourite authors and favourite works, including the following, among others:

ELSEWHERE (Derek Walcott)

GARDEN STATUES (Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi)

RUBAIYAT (Mimi Khalvati)

A Sort of Homecoming: An Essay on Poetry In Translation

The Missing Slate, a Pakistan-based online magazine of culture and literature, has published my essay called 'A Sort of Homecoming: Poetry In Translation'. Here's an excerpt:


"Paul Celan stayed in my life, and I read him on and off, but only occasionally and with difficulty. Almost fifteen years after the first encounter, when I started reading Celan more seriously, I realised that there had been many good reasons to keep him in my life. As it turned out, Celan was probably also my major entry point into the world of translated poetry, and the act of translating poetry.
I mistrusted translated poetry for a long time. As recently as a few years ago, I still felt that it basically couldn’t be done, or could only be a pale shadow of the original."


You can read the whole essay here.