Anna Dear

I've started 2022 off with plenty of Geopoetic action. Paul Stringer and I have nearly finished our poetry film set in and inspired by the amazing features of the UNESCO Black Country Geopark and discussing my poetics during my residency with the Black Country Geological Society. We'll be showing this at festivals during the year, so keep your eyes out. I've seen the first cut and it looks beautiful.
Last week I had the great pleasure of running a writing workshop for Spelt Magazine. I led the writers through some of the layers of Geopoetics, including the works of Kenneth White, George Amar, Francis Ponge, Norman Bissell, Alyson Hallett and Don McKay. Together we wrote geology inspired poems about the genius loci always under and on the edge of our everydays. One such contributor was the poet, Anna Dear, who shared this beautiful piece with me:

Who needs ghosts when matter
 nonchalantly haunts us
(Don McKay)
 
Black Country graptolite,
pencil sketch on slate,
a quarried splinter,
 
watershed: the mountains 
spill their tiny springs and gravity
takes hold, a force so ancient
 
that they can't refuse,
these floating tentacles, these small
aquatic colonisers, transient others
 
like ourselves, our arteries and veins,
our fascination with the forms of ferns,
for aerial photography of deltas, river beds,
 
our blue home's distant fractures
seen from space.

I love the dipping into deep time, past and present, distant and local in these lines - definitely creating Don McKay's crossing point between the sciences and the mystical in her thinking about our fossil record and place-identity.

If you want to catch more of what I do, I'll be supporting the launch of Judi Sutherland's new poetry collection - Following Teisa - on the 4th February. I've been an admirer of Sutherland's work for a long time and see her as an important figure in contemporary place writing and poetic cartography, so it means a lot to have been asked to read at this launch event. Book your space here. We'll be joined by poet, Sarah Doyle, too, so you won't want to miss this one.