I thought I’d take a moment to let readers of this blog know about three new endeavours that are already in hand or shortly coming to fruition.
A New Column!
The first is that since the early summer I have been contributing a weekly column to the Church Times which appears on the back page as ‘Poet’s Corner’. It is the successor to Ronald Blythe’s wonderful and long-running column ‘the Word from Wormingford’, which was series of glimpses and reflections of life and faith in a small corner of Suffolk from the pen of one of Britain’s greatest rural writers. It was an honour to be chosen as his successor and thought I can’t really ‘follow’ him, I have been doing my best to enjoy and master the 500 word essay as a form of prose poem. The column appears in print every Friday but is also available on the Church Times Website. A full read of the CT requires a subscription but you can read two or three articles each week without a subscription, so readers of this blog might care to dip into that column. Here are some links to a few of the pieces I’ve written so far:
A Moment in a Railway Carriage
A New Book!
My second endeavour has been work on a new anthology for Canterbury Press, called Love, Remember, and I am happy to say that this is now completed and the book itself should be out in November. It is an anthology of forty poems chosen to help the reader give voice to lamentation and grief but also to make the journey through that grief, towards hope, never letting go of love. It is intended as a kind of antidote to the apparently facile denials of Henry Scott Holland’s ‘Death is Nothing at All’. I say apparently facile because, as I discovered when I wrote the book, the famous Henry Scott Holland passage, often used at funerals is in fact torn out of context from a much greater and more grounded sermon. a sermon that faces the reality of grief and death, rather than denying it and so can offer in the end a greater and truer comfort. There will be an official Launch of my new book in Heffers in Cambridge on December 14th, but it should be available from the publisher, from amazon, and in shops before then. You can book for the book launch Here
Another New Book!!
Finally, the third endeavour is not really mine at all but is the work of the artist Faye Hall. She has made a truly beautiful book out of my sequence of poems ‘Seven Whole Days’ with stunning pictures for almost every line. You can see a video about it Here
North American can also order copies from Faye in time for Christmas Here
If you use the code ‘sevenpoet’ on Faye’s site you can get a 25% discount.
There is now an Amazon UK Page for the Book so you can order it from the UK
I also hope to have some copies available before Christmas for UK buyers so email me at malcolmguite@gmail.com if you’re interested
Malcolm Guite 