On a markedly autumnal evening, we were treated to a journey through words and worlds by these three very different poets, showing (not telling!) their deep love for and connection to the living world, the environment, social justice and more…
I am sure that her scientific background has something to do with Jemma’s particular, exact, almost forensic and hugely evocative way she writes about, for example, water, thistles, grass… You feel as though you’re listening to the music of her words while at the same time crouching over tiny things, peeling their layers to expose a human link within, or observing majestic phenomena with ancient resonances.
Derrick’s ‘elsewheres’ took us from Jerusalem to India through cheeky romance and an ironic look at the world of contemporary art. The very personal Dawn to Dusk contains one of the most memorable lines, for me, of the evening, and not just of the evening: Loaded down with the day`s detritus I watch the Moon ready to be wiped clean. As one member of the audience said to him, your poetry says it all.
Jude Rosen is such an original voice, introducing her deep knowledge of local (Lea Valley) history and her verbatim records of it as urban researcher into her poetry, gifting us with many voices within her own. What emerges is her love of not only the environment in general, but of particular environments, her mourning at their loss, and her joy at what is still there, and what will grow, still and again, or will be transformed, like a branch of a felled maple made into a harp.
After the interval we had a few questions and an interesting discussion about what is ‘nature poetry’ and whether it is political, whether it has power to change things, even when written without that particular purpose in mind, therefore not a campaigning exercise… All within the emergency situation the world is in…. The answer, as we all know, is in the wind!
With thanks as always to Kim and Emma at the Library, to Mari for helping with the refreshments, to all those who attended and, of course, to the poets.
Jemma Borg was born in Essex. She was an evolutionary geneticist and has worked in research, publishing and the voluntary sector. Her second collection, Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, was a Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry winner and included poems that won the RSPB/Rialto Nature and Place Competition and the inaugural Ginkgo Prize. She has recently completed a commission to write about the unique and protected national landscape where she lives in East Sussex, and will be reading the poem as part of the High Weald Walking Festival in September. She is also a contributor to the ecosonnet chain which is currently forming online, being curated by Linda France along with Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson at the University of Newcastle. www.jemmaborg.co.uk
Derrick Porter grew up in Hoxton in the East End in a non-literary environment but was encouraged to write in his forties by Ted Walter and to publish by Ken Worpole in Centreprise’s community publishing project. He joined the Poetry School and became a member Mimi Khalvati’s advanced workshop. His poems have appeared in Acumen, Envoi, Interpreter House, Long Poem Magazine, Magma and Poetry Review and in two anthologies This Little Stretch of Life (Hearing Eye, 2006) and I Am Twenty People (Enitharmon, 2007). He has been recognised in numerous poetry competitions. In 2015 his first collection Voices of Hoxton was published by Thamesis. His second collection, The Art of Timing, came out in September 2024 from Paekakariki Press.
Jude Rosen was born in the East End of London and worked as a historian, urban researcher and translator. A graduate of the Poetry School M.A. from Newcastle University (2022), she currently runs poetry workshops for refugees and migrants. Her pamphlet, A Small Gateway was published by Hearing Eye in 2009. Two further pamphlets – Underfoot, with poems appearing in Tears in the Fence, (March 2024) and Between the Ground and the Sky of Gaza – are awaiting publication. Her collection Reclamations from London’s Edgelands was published by Paekakariki Press in 2024. Poems from the book were performed on poem and living history walks of the Olympic zone 2015-19 (poemwalks.wordpress.com). A video “Desire Paths – a film haibun” of the ‘Desire Path vs. Enclosure’ walk on Leyton and Walthamstow marshes was produced by Fawzia Kane in 2016 (https://vimeo.com/197324168 ).
