MEET THE AUTHOR, DORCHESTER LIBRARY, JIM POTTS, 18 FEBRUARY 2023

 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/meet-the-author-jim-potts-tickets-523863900027

WILLA MUIR, THE USURPERS

Finally in print! The Usurpers was ready for publication in 1952, but it has never been published until now. The typescript has been held in the Special Collection of the Library of the University of St Andrews along with the diaries, journal and other manuscripts of Willa Muir. This is a publishing event of major importance, a political and satirical novel dealing with the years leading up to the Communist takeover of power in Prague in 1948. Willa and Edwin Muir lived in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 and both of them explored the impact of those tense and increasingly difficult times, Edwin in his poems and autobiography, Willa in The Usurpers and in her memoirs, Belonging.

COLENSO BOOKS, latest catalogue listing

 

Desert Island Poems

I have become involved with a Thomas Hardy Society poetry group which meets once a month to read and share a variety of poems by poets on a theme or topic as proposed in advance for each meeting.

As there are some excellent readers who find great poems, whether by Hardy or by others, it is always a pleasure to listen, to discover or rediscover poems.

What poems would you want to take with you if marooned on a desert island? The rules of the game were loosely suggested by the example of Desert Island discs.

Obviously it wouldn't be possible to read a long poem at such a meeting, but given the chance I would take a long epic to occupy my time in isolation or exile on an island:

Milton's Paradise Lost, Homer's Odyssey for starters.

Or amusing long poems like Byron's Don Juan. 

If allowed a sequence of poems, I'd take George Seferis' Mythistorima, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Eliot's Four Quartets, Blake's Songs of Experience, Hardy's Poems 1912-1913, William Barnes' Poems in the Dorset Dialect, Edwin Muir's The Labyrinth collection. That would probably be cheating.

In terms of shorter single poems, I'd probably take Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, Donne's Sweetest Love, I do not go, Hardy's Beeny Cliff, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Eliot's East Coker, Eva Strom's The Outer Hebrides. 

Ask me in a few weeks, and I'd probably come up with another list.

Sadly, I missed the meeting as my car battery was dead. The AA came eventually, and I had to buy a new battery.

Sarah Ekdawi, Poems by Daylight

I've been reading an outstanding collection of poems by Sarah Ekdawi, published by Colenso Books in November 2022.

Copies are available from many sources, here is the W H Smith listing, as an example:

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/.../paper.../9781912788262.html

I wasn't surprised to learn that Sarah has worked as a translator and that she has a keen interest in Sikelianos and Cavafy.

Poems by Daylight will continue to make a deep impression. Recommended!

From the publisher:

Sarah Ekdawi grew up in an Anglo-Egyptian household, inspiring in her a lifelong interest in other languages and cultures, including the dialect and literature of her mother's native Dorset. This first published collection of poetry represents a lengthy engagement, with poetry, as reader, scholar and translator (of Modern Greek). Composed over a twenty-year period, the poems can be read as five 'conversations' - the five sections of the collection - with significant others. Poems by Daylight raises questions about identity, intimacy, rejection, loss and gain. It reflects the author's love of the sea and especially the Dorset coast; her years in Ireland and her walks around the beautiful lake on the campus at MCU Thailand, where she is a visiting teacher. Above all, these poems address the fragility of human love, with all its 'slips and flaws and missed connections'.

Paul Theroux, from The Kingdom by the Sea, A Journey around the Coast of Great Britain

An American perspective, written forty years ago.