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My new collection, A Whistling of Birds, is out in the UK (Nine Arches) and in South Africa (Human & Rousseau). Both editions feature a selection of Douglas Robertson’s beautiful nature illustrations. For more information you can read the UK press release, watch the online triple-poet launch, or see more information and reviews on the Collections page of this website, which features my previous books too. Recordings of my reading of ‘The Woburn Robin’ and other short poem videos can be found on the Nine Arches YouTube channel too.

My next event is the D.H. Lawrence Poetry Celebration at the National Poetry Library, part of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival: 8pm (GMT) on Wednesday 30 October 2024. Tickets selling fast! The National Poetry Library is on Level 5, on the ‘Blue Side’ of the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XX. See more detail and book tickets here. I’m also looking forward to returning to read at The Wheatsheaf, one of London’s iconic poetry venues, on Wednesday 11 December. More details of other readers to be confirmed soon. & my first event for 2025 will be online on Friday 10 January for PoetryLit! Event link and more info to follow.

A quick look back at events in 2024 so far…

This October brought the joy of a weekend at the Edward Thomas Festival in Petersfield — and the chance to hear so many excellent poets and speakers, as well as enjoying running a poetry-art workshop with Douglas Robertson and a dozen lively, creative participants. The festival theme of ‘Poetry, Prose and Birdsong’ chimed beautifully with A Whistling of Birds and our collaboration and it was good to see Doug’s artwork shared with the workshop group and exhibited at Gallery No. 30 in town as well. A great gift to listen to Michael Longley read his work again and also hear Edna Longley speak with such deep knowledge and care about Edward Thomas, after following her critical work on Edward Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Louis Macneice for decades. Creative conversations and inspiration in a beautiful setting.

Another high point of my poetry year was the launch in July of Simon Barraclough’s new collection at Chener Books: Chris McCabe and I read in support and celebration of his brilliant Divine Hours, published by Broken Sleep. A bookshop full house and a happy night of serendipitously interweaving themes, with a great reading by Simon.

In May this year I enjoyed reading for Cambridge University’s Magdalene Poetry Society on what felt like the first real Summer Saturday in England — also one of this year’s ‘aurora nights’ (though I didn’t see the lights myself). It was wonderful to read outside in Magdalene College’s Cripps Courtyard, with an engaged audience on chairs and blankets on the grass, and twilight birds in the treetops riffing on the poems. Deeper into the year, I was glad to have two poems included in Poetry London’s Summer edition, Issue 208, the first edited by Niall Campbell. Lovely to read at the Summer Issue launch at the Royal Society of Arts in July, along with Annemarie Ni Churreanin and Romalyn Ante, and a group of talented Eric Gregory Award winners too.

Earlier in 2024 it was a thrill to read in Scotland again — at St Mungo’s Mirrorball at the CCA in Glasgow, a very special night. Later in February, another singular occasion, an invitation to read at the launch of Virgula by Sasja Janssen at the Music Room in Great Ormond Street, London, along with Sasja and her translator, poet and translator Michele Hutchison. Online, there were readings for Cape Town’s Off the Wall series and Norwich’s Café Writers in March and April. In March I also enjoyed the online opportunity to talk to the UK’s D.H. Lawrence Society, focusing on Lawrence’s travels, his ‘savage pilgrimage’ and nature poetry from that time. On the Zoom session I also read some of my poems from A Whistling of Birds which are linked to Lawrence and his iconic collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers. You can watch the video of the Zoom talk here.

More readings, festivals and exciting poetry and exhibition new to follow and all events are confirmed on my Readings & Events page.

A Whistling of Birds: a review by Dirk Klopper on LitNet
’The interweaving of the images of spoor, spider web and birdsong, the spirits of literary predecessors inhabiting the lexis and syntax of the poem, and the reaching across continents to form a thing of beauty out of the recursive furies and displacements of our lives, make the book an astonishing achievement. The illustrations by Douglas Robertson are apt and exquisite – the tirricks in flight along the top margin of the cover, the dung beetle, the lilting skyline and globe of the earth, the whale cradling the planet as it migrates in southern oceans, and the strip of savannah landscape snaking across four blank pages. The book is a gift.’

Best Books of 2023: Rebecca Foster, ‘Bookish Beck’ blog
'I was drawn to A Whistling of Birds for its acknowledged debt to D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Snakes, bees, bats and foxes are some of the creatures that scamper through the text. There are poems for marine life, fruit and wildflowers. You get a sense of the seasons turning, and the natural wonders to prize from each. … A real gem.’

You can order the Nine Arches edition and the South African edition from Human & Rousseau now and can see some of Doug’s images on the Birds, Beasts and Flowers page here. Doug’s gorgeous drawing of the Il Porcellino statue in Florence can be seen here in The Florentine, along with the companion poem, ‘My Sweet Fiorenza’ and some context about the writing of the poem.

A Whistling of Birds is deeply concerned with nature and the paths we track through our environment. It draws inspiration from several poets and artists, but is at times in dialogue with D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers — and I’m thrilled that 12 of Douglas Robertson’s beautiful drawings are included in the UK edition, the result of a long-running to-and-fro conversation around the birds and the ‘beasties’ and Lawrence’s nature writing. Following on from the 2023 centenary year for Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, I’ll be doing readings and conversations with Doug along with a wider exhibition featuring carvings and assemblages, alongside the drawings from the collection, and more. Watch this space!

Several poems from the collection have been published in international journals including Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, The Island Review, Confluence, Anthropocene, The Florentine, Finished Creatures, New Statesman, Bad Lilies, Under the Radar, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and the Places of Poetry anthology (Oneworld), edited by Paul Farley and Andrew McRae. In 2024 I have had new work in Hog River Press and Poetry London.

Here are a few poem publications from A Whistling of Birds:

‘Bede’s Sparrow’, New Statesman
18.5.22

‘Self-Portrait in Sweet Woodruff’, Herbology News
1.5.22

’Sweet Violet’, Bad Lilies, Issue 5
December 2021

You can read the occasional journal piece and news about new poem publications on the Toktokkie page on this site. A toktokkie is a South African beetle, named for the tapping sounds it makes. Some of my taps here are about D.H. Lawrence and A Whistling of Birds. ‘Karoo Rain’, is about drought and rain in my home town Graaff-Reinet, in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa — though rain has fallen and coronavirus has come since then ...

Past Collections
My fourth collection Bearings was published by Nine Arches Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa in 2016.
The same year, Edinburgh publisher Mariscat launched The Leonids, a pamphlet of poems mostly about that force of nature, my mother, Ann Dixon, who died in 2015. The Herald Scotland chose 'My Mother's Dress' (part of 'Notes Towards Nasturtiums') as Poem of the Day and The Scotsman published 'binding' from the pamphlet. You can read '9 a.m', a poem from the collection, on Aerodrome here. Copies can be ordered from Mariscat, or if you want a signed copy, contact me.

On the Poetry Archive, you can hear me reading ‘Plenty’, a poem about water and the lack of it, for my mother and scattered sisters. ‘Plenty’, from my earlier collection, A Fold in the Map, has been included in the iGCSE English syllabus.

Future Publications
Nine Arches will publish my new collection The Landing, about my mother, including some of the poems from The Leonids, in September 2026. Here is the title poem ‘The Landing’ as it appeared in the New Statesman in July 2019, 50 years after the first manned moon landing.

If you have a professional query about your own writing please contact me or one of my excellent colleagues via the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency website. Please take a careful look at the submission guidelines.

 The author photograph on this page is by Jo Kearney | jokearneyphotography.com