POETRY
AT THE MUSEUM IN THE PARK
STROUD
Wednesday February 5th 2025
7.30 for 8 pm
Just over an hour of poetry from five poets.
Sarah Brooker, Frank McMahon, Rowan Middleton,
Philip Rush & Caroline Shaw.
Five books for sale,
including four new pamphlets
from Yew Tree Press.
Refreshments.
Free entry and everybody welcome.
In Double Edge, Sarah Brooker combines rich and colourful artwork with honest poems about pain and difficulties, poems which are leavened by humour and wry language. Frank McMahon lives in Cirencester. His most recent book, The Light will Always Return, was published last April; Frank is “a poet with a rare sensitivity to place and experience”. Rowan Middleton's poems are quiet meditations in a soft voice. A good poem lingers in the mind and these poems gently invite us to spend some time considering our local environment. Philip Rush’s new pamphlet, Salon des Refusés, complements his Garlic Press book, Camera Obscura. With a certain ironic distance his poems celebrate ritual, the countryside and memory. The poems in Caroline Shaw’s new pamphlet, Night Walking, capture her reading voice in their language and rhythms and in their humorous and occasionally self-deprecating honesty; they are truthful and resonant.
In Double Edge,
Sarah Brooker combines
rich and colourful artwork
with honest poems about
pain and difficulties
which are leavened by humour
and wry language.
Soon to be available through our Big Cartel page.
Rowan Middleton's poems
are quiet meditations
in a soft voice.
A good poem lingers in the mind
and these poems
gently invite us to spend some time
considering our local environment.
Soon to be available through our Big Cartel page.
The poems in Caroline Shaw's
new pamphlet capture her reading voice
in their language and rhythms
and in their humorous
and occasionally self-deprecating honesty.
They are truthful and resonant.
Soon to be available through our Big Cartel page.
A "collection of deceptively powerful and quietly moving poems".
Colin Pink
[Review in 'Acumen']
"One poem – ‘Think Tank Thug’ – employs
the sort of exaggeratedly long lines and prosy style
that always make me sigh and turn to the next page.
Not here. Here, I love it.
I find it so delightful and so clever
that I can’t bring myself to write about the poem
or quote an extract
– although I long to introduce you
to “the strong verbs”
drinking in the pub.
If you were here,
I would make you sit down
and listen to me reading it aloud.
Possibly twice.
"So what is the secret?
It’s partly character.
It’s the personality of Philip Rush,
whoever and whatever he is (I don’t know him).
He’s quirky, funny, thoughtful, entertaining.
He doesn’t show off.
He shares what feels like the perfect phrase,
or word, or expression for the context,
as though he’d picked it up while walking in the woods.
The writing’s mainly rooted in the natural world
where everything is as ordinary
(and as miraculous) as a leaf, if you look at it carefully.
He does look. And the more you read him,
the more you trust him to tell you what he sees."
Helena Nelson
"The book concludes with a true masterpiece,
‘ ‘Folk Routes, New Routes’
An Ode to Davey Graham & Shirley Collins’,
a freewheeling hymn to, maybe elegy for,
the outward-facing, optimistic England of the Sixties.
Ostensibly written
around the hugely influential 1964 album
recorded by Graham and Collins,
with Gus Dudgeon at the mixing desk,
but which also contrives to encompass
maps, cars, football, Dr Johnson, wild flowers
and the old, pre-1974 counties,
including Philip’s own Middlesex.
In it, a ‘vintage old-school / road atlas [ . . .]
/ includes a short / and largely pointless
/ section of the M1, /
a stub of the M5 / leading south from Birmingham /
and the entire M50' ...
It’s a poem like no other I know."
Matthew Paul
Now available through our Big Cartel page.
POETRY WALKS
DIALECT POETRY WALKS IN STROUD
“The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass”
‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ John Keats
Three walks with poems, each walk about three miles,
taking about an hour and a half.
The poems will echo something in the walk and the place,
and will include both old and new texts.
The walks are to be led by Philip and Caroline Rush.
Winter mud and frost almost certainly guaranteed.
Mittens essential, gaiters or boots desirable, prize for best hat.
Meeting places with parking and so on
will be sent out shortly before the walk.
(Walks will be postponed in the event
of orange or red weather warnings,
and possibly after yellow warnings;
they will be rescheduled.)
Tuesday 26th November 11 am: Avening.
Saturday 14th December 11 am: Chalford
Monday 20th January St Agnes’ Eve 11 am: Oxlynch and Standish Woods
Everyone is very welcome.
Tickets are £30 for three; £12 for a single walk
(see Dialect website for booking).
If you’re on a low income
or experiencing financial difficulty for any reason,
we can offer 'pay what you can' and free spaces on each walk.
Please contact juliette.morton@dialect.org.uk to request.