A very thoughtful, considered review of my poetry collection ‘Street Sailing’ in Briefly Write. Click the link to read it on their site. ‘In ‘Street Sailing’, Matt Gilbert looks anew upon familiar streetscapes. His reader can’t not keep looking’ ‘Street Sailing’ is a puzzle with many readings and many answers. Matt Gilbert is a skilful setter,…
Where were the bored teenagers, the drunks, shouting kids, people laughing, shouting into mobile phones? Stray cats. Lost dogs. Lost souls. In this city of banks, presumably there must be squads of stressy men and women in tight blue suits pushing through the crowds, busy busy busy? Where was the noise, the random, the edge?
After a brilliant online launch in May, I’m having a live launch on 29th June at The Bookseller Crow, Crystal Palace.
Guests – Joe Duggan & Matthew M C Smith will both be reading, along with me.
I’ll also be interviewed about the book by Karen McCleod.
Tickets £5 – including a drink.
My debut poetry book ‘Street Sailing’ is now out in the wild. Cover art by Ben Pearce. Published by Black Bough Poetry.
Later, up on the high downs, I hope to hear skylarks. I always enjoy the pleasing shock in the contrast between the drab brown looks of these small birds and the piping, apparently overflowing joy of their calls, as they come popping out of long grass, like a choir of demented rubber balls, springing for the stars.
I have my first poetry book coming out in spring 2023, with Black Bough Poetry. That’s a pretty big and thrilling thing. I get excited enough about individual poems being accepted by a magazine or website, but a book? Bloody hell. It’s especially surprising to me, as I stopped writing poetry in any serious way…
A short poetry post, to end my blogging year with. Two short imagist poems recently shared via @toptweettuesday on Twitter. Alongside a wintry Crystal Palace Park, replete with Penge Nessy. I had planned a reading year in review, but am frantically trying to finish Middlemarch, so that’ll become post one of 2023. In the meantime,…
Lofted above a scaggy, driftwood scattered beach,
lording over chunks of rock, a stilted steam-punk
iron torch, painted in off-white,
I began to wonder, what makes a hill? Did all this tarmac count?
Fences, PRIVATE SIGNS, the houses? Were they part hill as well – landscape like the stone and grass? The buzzard overhead, was that part sky, part bird, part hill?
In my mental landscape, Bristol is a city of hills, not towers. Although, one local tower – the Purdown Transmitter, or BT Tower loomed large in my imagination. Not least because it looked more like some kind of alien space station, than a building that belonged at the north eastern edge of 1980s Bristol.
Three poems recently shared via Black Bough Poetry’s @Toptweettuesday on Twitter.If you enjoy reading this, I also recently had some other poems published by Ink Sweat & Tears and Briefly Write – click the links to view. If you’re really, really interested, even more can be found in the Published Elsewhere page on this very…
What if your average numbered walking guide, turned out to do much more – going beyond the basic geography to be predictive, intuitive, even psychic? If that happened, it might go something like this…
I often find it’s the unexpected encounters, or ‘walk shocks’, that make a particular trip memorable.
That was certainly true of at least three I’ve been on this year – plodding along, looking out for particular views, famous sites, when, wham! something, usually from the more-than-human world, was suddenly present, changing the view, changing the day, changing everything.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that “nature” isn’t always, or only, to be found somewhere else. I was reminded of this with a visual jolt from a poppy this morning. On a road about five minutes’ walk away from mine, between the foot of the iron railings of a factory (makers of corrosion prevention and…
For a lover of hills, this small region of the country offers quite the range: steep hills, lone hills, round hills, hills with views of the sea, hills buzzed by kestrels, or patrolled by buzzards, internationally renowned hills with ruined churches on top, hills crowned by stands of trees, hills once topped by hill-forts, hills with winds that land a flurry of blows near the summit and hills disguised as city streets, with houses and shops groaning up and down their slopes.
I like to start at the western end, off Finch Avenue. To get there, I walk over a railway bridge that looks nothing like a railway bridge, then before reaching the corner, hop up the low wall between a hawthorn and a young oak, and then like many others, cut across the desire path worn into the grass.
Surrounding the wall, stubby ash and elephantine coils of Cherry Laurel gave a writhing border to the site, which, just for a moment, became an abandoned sacred grove. For some reason – the unnatural quiet perhaps – the spot felt like a Celtic ‘Thin Place’, or more accurately a broken thin place, as here it seemed, any doorway to the eternal world had been blocked by litter and forgotten.
Going down to the mill is something we do every time we come here. It’s a short distance downhill from Rue de la Roche, where my parents-in-law live, to the town’s second river. When the water is low, as it usually is in August, the visit also includes a walk across the stepping stones and…
I started to wonder how far I should go, without a map or much water, but a trail leading out of town and into the fields is always hard to resist. After all, as Richard Jeffries notes in in Nature Near London, one should “Never omit to explore a footpath, for never was there a footpath yet which did not pass something of interest.”
Richly Evocative 