Gregory Leadbetter and Jonathan Davidson are two poets whose work I love and go back to again and again. They are also champions of poetry – and on Tuesday night this week – because of their passion and organisational skills – I was able to see two of the Next Generation Poets…
I was particularly excited as I have been almost buying Sean Borodale’s collection BEE JOURNAL – ever since it won the T S Eliot Prize in 2012 (and the Costa Book Award in 2013). Here was my chance to hear some of it, actually from the man himself.
I was expecting someone older
He is a quiet, thoughtful, wonderful poet – an excerpt from 24th MAY: COLLECTING THE BEES
…
He just wears a veil, this farmer, no gloves
and lifts open a dribbly wax-clogged
blackwood box.
We in our whites mute with held breath.
Hello bees.
Drops four frames into our silence
….
He told me afterwards that he had wanted to keep bees, and hadn’t thought of writing about them until he saw them, and then I think, he was hit with an overwhelming need to – and a feeling of “rightness”. He wrote all his poems there, with the bees – in his beekeper’s garb – huge fat white gloves and all.
I hadn’t heard of Emily Berry before Tuesday – but I now too own her book “Dear Boy”
And her poems opened my eyes to new ways of writing, and how wonderful “the poetry establishment” is – as this book is published by Faber and Faber; plus it won theForward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize
Stephen Morrison-Burke – the Birmingham Poet Laureate of 2012 kicked the evening off. And that was my only regret of the evening… not telling him just how much I liked his poems – and his warm confident performance.
The other Next Generation Poets 2014 (POETRY BOOK SOCIETY) can be found on www.nextgenerationpoets.com and include
Adam Foulds (The Broken Word)
Rebecca Goss (Her Birth) and
Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion)
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