ALL CHANGE

A new year is a good time for change, moving on, isn’t it? So, the plan is I won’t be adding any new posts here. I’m heading across to Substack for a brand new iteration of this blog/notebook/newsletter. It’s a foreign country and I don’t quite speak the language yet. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it but you can subscribe here to read my first trial post. It’s free and everyone is welcome.

Thank you to everybody who’s followed me so faithfully and in such numbers over the past decade or so. I hope some of you might skip over to Substack if you want to stay in touch with what I’m doing. Still committed to working with poetry and ecology, I have lots of interesting new developments in mind and – looking forward to a fresh start.

Go well.

L

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Hip Hip Hooray!

So, I’ve been riding the waves of the past few weeks in the little ark that is this year’s Laurel Prize. Down to Birmingham for Contains Strong Language and The Verb, where I was able to catch the PoliNations landscape in Victoria Square. Good to see the centre of the city colonised by plants and poetry, rain-catching trees and resting places.

You can listen to this episode of The Verb on catch-up here.

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Then on to Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a day of readings and workshops. One of my favourite places, it was wonderful to be there on a day of sunshine, lighting up Robert Indiana’s powerful sculptures – the world of words and numbers re-imagined in his colourful configurations.

You can watch the prize ceremony, hosted by Simon Armitage, here and listen to us all read poems from the winning collections. Absolutely delighted that The Knucklebone Floor has been honoured in this way that highlights the past year’s poetry books entangling themselves with nature and the land. Chair of the judges, Glyn Maxwell, said:

‘Linda France’s The Knucklebone Floor leaves one with a sense of being guided through an infinite afternoon, green thoughts in green shades. The distant past and the dimly arriving future seem balanced in the hands of the blessèd guide who leads the reader through, a deep feminine spirit here to reclaim what can be reclaimed from the wreck of where we are, here to suggest myriad paths out of the wilderness. A work of deep music and wisdom, an enchanted garden of a book.’

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Everyone’s been so kind and warm in offering their congratulations – I’m very grateful – thank you thank you thank you!

I’ll be reading from it, alongside Helen Mort (whose latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize) at the Leper Chapel, Ripon, on Sunday 25th September 7.30pm – the closing event of Ripon Poetry Festival.

If you’d like to buy a copy of The Knucklebone Floor, please visit the Smokestack website or order it from your local bookshop.

Laurel Prize Longlist

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Delighted that The Knucklebone Floor has made it onto this year’s Laurel Prize longlist. Many thanks to the judges and congratulations to my fellow poets. Some I’ve read and admired already but so many collections here I want to read…

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Here’s a review of The Knucklebone Floor on the London Grip site. If you’d like to write one of your own and have somewhere to send it, please contact me via my website.

Thank you.

LF

In And Out Of The Woods

As yesterday was the anniversary of my arrival in Sydney (for my stint at the Botanic Gardens in 2013), it seemed like the perfect day to receive an email from the folk at Plumwood Mountain (An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics) letting me know their first issue is now available online.

The poem of mine they have included considers the ants I met while I was in Australia.  I like the idea of them being called back home, to the forests where they belong.

This week I’ve been enjoying listening to Germaine Greer read from her new book White Beech: The Rainforest Years, about her conservation efforts on 60 hectares of an old dairy farm in south eastern Queensland.  It’s a great venture and her narrative is teeming with powerful evocations of the plant, bird and insect life at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley.  As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says in The Independent, ‘It really is some story’, written by a woman who is ‘a force of nature and among its most erudite defenders’.

Closer to home, several of the trees in our woods were perilously near to crashing down in last autumn’s storms so they’ve had to be felled.  They’re such enormous trees, fir and spruce, that their shift from vertical to horizontal makes the space out there feel quite different.  It’s as if something’s been erased, a stretch of time lost.  But I’m sure the ants will be very happy.

‘How long does it take to make the woods?’

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you get there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness and joy, by passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the straight way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.
Wendell Berry