My work on Places of Poetry

I shared seven works as part of the Places of Poetry project.

The map has grown into a rich resource, which uses creative writing as a mode of reflection, to think about and encounter national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place.

My poems:
Making Music at Folly Farm
Et Spiritus
Our Table is Vacant at the Walker Cafe
Fairy Glen, Sefton Park
Liverpool Lime Street, Sunday Night
Submerged Forest at Hightown
The Forty-Ninth Iron Man

The project is inspired by Michael Drayton’s 15,000-line epic of national description, Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), which includes a unique set of county and regional maps by the engraver William Hole, upon which the Places of Poetry map is based. The poem itself uses places as points of entry into historical narratives, building in the process an extraordinary national vision. Poly-Olbion only describes England and Wales. It was largely written in the years after King James VI of Scotland was installed as James I of England, proclaiming a vision of a united island kingdom. Like many of James’s subjects, however, Drayton was unconvinced, and never fulfilled his stated intention to extend his poem into the land of King James’s birth. Places of Poetry follows Drayton’s model, and hopes to reflect in the process on the connections and tensions – then and now – between the constituent nations of the United Kingdom.