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COLLECTED LONGER POEMS
Posted in Grey Suit Editions, Poetry
Tagged Anthony Howell, Grey Suit Editions UK, longer poems, poetry
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WRITING AT THE ROOM – Poetry, text, sound, song
3 pm Sunday October 6. Featuring Michelene Wandor and Anthony Howell
Hosted by Marian Eastwood and Patricia Ahern
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The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale/Bruce Grove
London N17 9AS – enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Open mike. BYO – suggested contribution £5 – all contributions go to the featured poets. Bring your books to display.
Michelene Wandor is a dramatist, poet, cultural commentator and musician. She has written countless (well, over 60!) plays and dramatisations for Radios 3 and 4, as well as books about theatre and gender and Creative Writing. Her most recent poetry is ‘Ergo’ (Arc Publications, 2024), and, with her early music group, ‘Siena’, she made the first UK CD of the secular and sacred music of Salamone Rossi, the early 17th-century composer and contemporary of Monteverdi. The Italian world of the latter also forms the subject of her first novel, ‘Orfeo’s Last Act’, short-listed for the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Prize.
ABOUT MICHELENE WANDOR
Anthony Howell is a poet and novelist whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. Another novel Oblivion has recently been published by Grey Suit editions. He was invited to the International Writers Program, University of Iowa in 1971. His Selected Poems came out from Anvil, and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge. His poems have appeared in The New Statesman, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. His articles on visual art, dance, performance and poetry have appeared in many journals and magazines including Artscribe, Art Monthly, The London Magazine, and Harpers & Queen. In 1997 he was short-listed for a Paul Hamlyn Award for his poetry. His versions of the Silvae of Statius have been well received and Plague Lands, his versions of the poems of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Julian Stannard., Philip Hancock, poetry, Writing at the room
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PUTIN’S DAUGHTER
x
Aged eleven, I was sent to meet Putin’s daughter.
She was a year or so younger. Smiling, she invited me
To go out for a ride with her. Two white horses were provided.
She of course rode brilliantly, but I was pretty good
And we had an exhilarating ride. Passionate at that age,
I fell in love with her, as Dante did when he set eyes on Beatrice,
As when as a dancer, I fell in love with Russians and with Russia.
x
From The Runiad, Book 5
Losing a Slave Girl
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Around my garden the little wall is low;
In the bailiff’s lodge the lists are seldom checked.
I am ashamed to think we were not always kind;
I regret your labours, that will never be repaid.
The caged bird owes no allegiance;
The wind-tossed flower does not cling to the tree.
Where tonight she lies none can give us news;
Nor any knows, save the bright watching moon.
x
Bai JuYi
771-846
reprinted from allpoetry.com
TOTTENHAM TREES POETRY READING AT THE ROOM
Hilary Davies has published four volumes of poetry with Enitharmon Editions. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’ s College, London and the British Library, is a former Eric Gregory award winner and and also former Chairman of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. In November 2023, a portfolio of her poems was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award.
Anthony Howell’s first collection of poems, Inside the Castle came out in 1969. In 1986 his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars. He was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and his Analysis of Performance Art is published by Routledge. Plague Lands, his versions of the poems of Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, were a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2011. He is editor of Grey Suit Editions. He is a Hawthornden fellow and has recorded poems for The Poetry Archive. His latest book of poems is From Inside published by The High Window.
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement,[2][3] an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Hilary Davies, Open Mike, Poetry of Trees, The Room Tottenham, Wangari Maathai
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FACES AND VASES
Recent developments: drawing in lead pencil over indigo/black paint.
Several drawings done with the eyes closed. Erasure on vases done with the eyes closed.
The vases are inspired by a line from one of my own poems: the broken vase competes with the vase complete.
These works are the outcome first of drawing with the eyes closed, and then of painting with the eyes closed, and then of combining these activities.
Of a Snake and a Stith
From Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk. Seems a bit like NATO threatening Russia. A “stith” is an anvil.
A snake, being in malice with a stith, laboured to bite off a piece of it. But the more fiercely he bit, the more he hurt himself. For whilst that being blinded with the witchery of presumption, he considered not that the hardness and substantialness of the steel could not be overcome by the tenderness and brittleness of his teeth, and that his contending was against an enemy whose revenge he might not hope to scape, and whose strength he was not able to impair. He unawares bereft himself of his teeth, and received of the stithy such answer as this: ‘O too, too mad and worse than mad! Although thy teeth were of brass, and as fast riveted in thy head as could be, yet could they nothing avail against the hardness and substantialness of my nature.’
The Morals: This fable reproveth the fondness of such as, being of no strength at all or having very little, contend with those that are of such force and power as is able to despise and subdue even the stoutest that be.
MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations (Volume 12) edited by Liza Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos, Modern Humanities Research Association.
Gonzalo Lira on Victoria Nuland
A piece by the intrepid journalist Gonzalo Lira – murdered recently in a Ukrainian jail.
Posted in Politics, war, Whistleblower Lit
Tagged Gonzalo Lira, Ukraine, Victoria Nuland
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Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the state of the world today
Colonel Macgregor is to my mind one the most astute commentators on the state of affairs that exists in the world today, and this interview with a German site gives a very good introduction to his thought.
Douglas Abbott Macgregor (born January 4, 1947) is a retired U.S. Army colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator. He was a leader in an early tank battle in the Gulf War and was a top planner in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. His 1997 book Breaking the Phalanx argued for radical reforms inside the Army.
After leaving the military in 2004, he became more politically active. In 2020, then-president Donald Trump proposed Macgregor as ambassador to Germany, but the Senate blocked the nomination. On November 11, 2020, a Pentagon spokesperson announced that Macgregor had been hired to serve as Senior Advisor to the Acting Secretary of Defense, a post he held for less than three months. Trump also appointed him to the board of the United States Military Academy, but the appointment was terminated by the incumbent president Joe Biden. Macgregor regularly contributes to Fox News and has appeared on the Russian state-funded channel RT.
Heyzine Books – Read some of my work for free online.
I have published several of my books on this attractive site which closely resembles a printed book in its format. You can read them all for free. There are plenty of my earlier books in print and on Abebooks, Amazon and Ebay (Tangoshiva) if you want a physical object. And Grey Suit Editions has recently published my Complete Longer Poems.
These days, though, I care more about getting a wider readership than I do about sales, and Heyzine is a system which enables this. So do click on the link to each book I have so far made available via Heyzine. You will find these links below. The bar under the text enables you to slide to the page you wish to read. Expand to fill the screen. I suggest turning off the sound of the page being turned.
It costs between £40 and £100 to make a printed version of these titles, but I can get a few with print on demand if anyone is interested in having a very limited edition hard copy! Only one (Autumn) already exists in printed form and can be ordered from me for £20 plus postage.
Listed here are the free titles so far:
THE RUNIAD – my epic poem, completed 2025 – illustrated by the author. It was a challenge to write a poem as long as The Odyssey. As I wrote it, I shared my drafts with readers here, letting them witness the process I go through when I write. There are 24 books, all in verse. This is the final draft, and it is currently being meticulously proof-read by Peter Jay – who was the publisher of Anvil Press Poetry – with a view to future publication by Grey Suit Editions. So this is still a draft, not the final version. But here is the heyzine link.
AUTUMN – Fragment of a Diary in Verse. Here is the Heyzine Link.
CANCELLED IN PARIS – Selected Essays volume 1. More to follow. Here is the Heyzine link.
And here is the heyzine link to The Books by my Bed – Selected Essays, volume 2
IMMORALISM – a book length essay with illustrations, one of eight essays on “The Rivers of Art” Here is the Heyzine link
THE BEST DEBORAH STORIES – a portrait of my mother – before and after I was born. Here is the Heyzine link to this partly autobiographical text.
SHORTER POEMS – Here is the heyzine link.
AS IF IT WERE A BOW – my book of poetry written in Thailand (with my own drawings and paintings). Here is the heyzine link
Another Heyzine book – my abstract poems – here is the Heyzine link. (with my own abstract paintings). It has been brought out online to accompany my Collected Longer Poems – now published by Grey Suit Editions UK.
To accompany this, there is Odin at the Well and other texts – conceptual and abstract writings – some written over 50 years ago, some written recently. Here is the Heyzine link.
SERBIAN STURGEON – a facsimile of a journal of a visit to Belgrade published by Harwood Academic Publishers in 2001. When taken over by Routledge all files for this book went missing. So I have scanned in my copy and here is the Heyzine link
HOT DAMN – A Poetic Rage – A text completed in 1974 – Here is the Heyzine link
Temptation in Whispers is an abstract novel which first appeared as an Argotist ebook – I have now added it to this heyzine book library
I have also published Passenger as a Heyzine book. It contains poems written in the USA, mainly around New York, New England and the Maritimes (plus Canada) with my own water-colours as illustrations.
PHILOCTETES – my version of the play by Sophocles. Here is the Heyzine link
And another Heyzine book: Major Stede Bonnet – Gentleman Pirate
This is a novel of letters about a real pirate who was also a gentleman, and the only pirate to have purchased his own sloop. An enigmatic character, who may have become a pirate because of marital problems. Here is the Heyzine link
Open the Heyzine link. I suggest clicking on the ‘sound’ icon to switch it off! The arrow at the foot of the page enables one to turn the pages. Expand the image to full screen.
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For details about published works that can usually be purchased via Amazon or ebay please visit WRITINGS
My selling site for GREY SUIT EDITIONS and other books can be found on ebay at Tangoshiva
See also GREY SUIT EDITIONS.
Posted in Ebooks and flipbooks, FICTION, Grey Suit Editions, HEYZINE BOOKS, Key Links, Poetry, Thailand, The Runiad
Tagged Anthony Howell, epic, Essays, Grey Suit Editions UK, HEYZINE BOOKS, novellas, poetry, Runiad, Thailand
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