In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: bilingual poems for display

  • Poems for the Wall

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    I haven’t mentioned this project here for a while. I started it over twenty years ago, now. Both of the following two statements are true : it remains what it has always been – very much a one-man-band ; but also, and from the beginning, it has received help and support from a wide range…

  • Four New Poems

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    1/ ‘In the Cathedral‘ is in 5 short parts. 2/ ‘Word-Finding‘  is in 5 short parts. 3/ ‘Dancing in a Daze’  is of 1 part, but there are ‘notes’ overleaf. 4/ ‘Rowing‘  is of one part.   I seem to have stopped spluttering helplessly and hopelessly in prose, in response to present-day developments within… continue…

  • Posted:

    Photograph by Dimitar Dilkoff : AFP via Getty Images       Reproduced by permission of the poet and translators. Find the translation of the whole poem here. The “Poems for…the wall” website has a bilingual version on its home page. It can be viewed (and downloaded from) here. Thanks to the PEN Ukraine team…

  • Across the Way

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    “The Reader” is a national charity. “From its global Shared Reading movement, to its Calderstones Park home in Liverpool… “The Reader” builds lively communities that bring people together and books to life.” And my project “Poems for…the wall” and “The Reader” are exploring ways we might collaborate a bit. In the meantime, one of “The…

  • Poems for Public Display

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    I never stop yearning for good poetry to reach past its traditional catchment areas – those shelves in the bookshop marked “Poetry,” the university literature department, the dedicated arts festival, the shy, solitary and possibly eccentric brain – and find a valid place for itself in the public square, the waiting room where we all…

  • An Exhibition of Bilingual Poems

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    I’m uploading below a set of photographs of an exhibition I organised a few months ago, in Clifton Cathedral, Bristol. The picture above is just one example. Several pictures show, as this does, how the exhibition looked in its setting. Several more show single poems close up, the words made somehow even stronger in their…

  • A Poem Exhibition in Clifton Cathedral

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    About three months ago, I organised an exhibition of poem-posters in Clifton Cathedral. This is a bold and wonderful Roman Catholic building in Bristol, designed and built in the 1960’s and 70’s. The exhibition took place on a balcony there, built above the font and overlooking the altar. As soon as I am able, I…

  • Poems in Public

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    Poetry once belonged only in open space – the mead hall by a great fire, where flea-bitten warriors sat at table with their lord ; or a place of worship or ceremony, the wedding, the funeral. Not in private, on paper, let alone on screen. Poetry belonged in the air between people, out loud. Accordingly,…