poetry

I was delighted to finally be able to pick up my copy of Stride, the latest book of poetry by Jim Trainer, whose poetry, prose and music I have been following for a number of years. Though the book was published before xmas last year, I had it posted to Canada, knowing that I'd be visiting this summer, as a protest against An Post's practice of double taxarion, which Revenue Ireland turns a blind eye to. In the end Revenue gets the tax income so they are happy enough to ignore any methods used by other government bodies. Not sure what An Post's reason is for deciding to tax on the postage from another country that already charges tax (and hence that is included with delivery costs of any item from anywhere!) but the excuse of "Brexit" doesn't hold water.

I was also happy to get the gorgeous black & silver broadside of the poem Recurrent.

While I was away my own poem, Theft, was published in Remington Review and I was delighted to be included in this online journal among other talented writers and artists.

Here is the poem Theft:

Precariat Press

It's been a good few years that I have been thinking of putting together a collection of my poetry and wondering how I should go about it. While self-publishing has, in contemporary times, always gotten a bad rap as "vanity", historically it was crucial to artistic survival: the Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press and printed Virginia's work, and earlier, across an ocean, Walt Whitman published his enduring work Leaves of Grass himself. Most recently I have been inspired by American writer, Jim Trainer, who vowed to publish a collection of his poetry annually for ten years (I have 2018 & 2019 collections, but I think he started in 2015). I was originally drawn to his writing through his monthly article, The Coarse Grind, and his own blog of personal journalism, Going for the Throat, before I discovered that he was a poet too. So, in good company I set about founding my own press. After sessions of brainstorming with my husband, artist James Hayes, a name for the press and an image for its logo were decided. James designed this logo in record time for me.

I had already decided that my first collection would be a chapbook, with the title and cover image based on the bon voyage card I made for my grandparents after first meeting them in 1967. I gave an explanation of what led to that meeting and images of the original card in my blog post last week. Here is the idea sketch for the cover. I will do a full drawing as it will be a lino block print. I was dithering about handpainting areas of colour, but it is most likely to be monochromatic. While I have use of a printing press, I plan to print the front and back covers as one page, also making a linocut of the logo, so colour has yet to be decided.