“The Book Remembers” now online!

I am very pleased to announce that the online edition of Verse Kraken #2 is up, and it contains my poem The Book Remembers!

Click here to reach the main page for Verse Kraken #2, or click here to go straight to The Book Remembers.

The Book Remembers is a poem about memory, voice, and captive women – and where they are found in The Exeter Book, one of the few surviving collections of literature in Old English. It is also an experiment in creating a palimpsest that is not visual, but aural (and indeed oral). You can read my detailed artists’ statement by clicking here.

While this poem is meant primarily as an audio piece, I have also created a PDF version which “translates” the audio palimpsest back into a visual representation. You can read it by clicking here.

I’d also like to thank everyone who was at the launch party for Verse Kraken’s second issue – it was a truly magical evening, full of talent. Pieces that particularly stuck with me were Cathy Dreyer‘s “Palimpseas” and Deya Mukherjee’s “The Colour of Prayer”. There is a lovely review (with photographs) by Alex Dally MacFarlane here, which also names my piece as her favourite of the evening – thank you so much, Alex!

I absolutely loved working on The Book Remembers – it was really interesting to go back to all the ideas I was focusing on a few years ago, when I was actively studying Anglo-Saxon literature as well as writing poetry inspired by it. It’s making me consider dusting off some of my other translations/transformations of Old English lit and submitting them for publication elsewhere – or maybe I’ll just post them on here sometime!