Authors Electric

March must be the month for poetry as I see Peter Leyland posted something About Poetry on Saturday, I do hope you will allow me to add my own thoughts and memories... Poetry can take many forms from sonnets to Limericks, Haiku to Villanelle (OK I confess I’m not really sure of the structure for a Villanelle – didn’t she want to kill Eve?} I digress, and I might meander even more as I write this in a lyrical style as poems are often written Hmm I wonder what actually constitutes a poem?  I’m loathed to look up a definition, Google will undoubtedly bamboozle me. Poems can be highbrow and esoteric or about the mundane and everyday – I wrote one once about belly button fluff – more about that later… I started writing poetry early and here’s one of my early efforts from primary school. I also remember writing one at BIG school about a dolls house, I vividly recall reading it out in class, it had a repeated refrain which everyone joined in with. I was in year 7, or first ...

  Oysgeshsternt is a Yiddish word. It means crowded with stars. I heard it recently at the Purbeck International Chamber Music Festival as part of their Forgotten Voices programme. I love it – the programme and the word. We stayed on after the concerts had ended and had a few more days walking around various beautiful places in that part of Dorset, including the church at Moreton with its etched-glass windows by Whistler.   We’ve not been back home long, and I am spun out and all out of ideas, so having started with oysgeshsternt, I’ll go on with a theme of heavenly bodies and share some poems about the night sky and various planets. I’m not sure it fits with what Authors Electric is about, but it is the best I can do for now.  SKY-WATCHING   Out in the street as the evenings drew in that time between supper and bed, we lay flat on our backs, looking up at the sky,   naming constellations, tracking the moon from sickle blade to dinner plate, ...

My picture book Nobody, Him and Me features a murderous, bullying cat, Biter the Fighter. Three small, smart mice trick him into chasing them up onto a high beam and then they scamper down, leaving him stranded and quivering because he’s afraid of heights. Ultimately, he’s carried off on a cushion to Mrs Kindly’s Rest Home for Distressed Moggies.    I had to change ‘Moggies’ to ‘Cats’ which was a shame, I thought. Anyway, after a school visit in which I used the book, a teacher came up and fixed me with a decidedly evil eye. ‘You don’t like cats, then,’ she snarled. I defended myself by drawing her attention to my other book featuring a cat, The Hob and Miss Minkin stories. Miss Minkin is a beloved tabby in a farmhouse modelled on the smallholding we moved to when I was in my teens. At night, when the family is asleep, she swaps stories and has adventures with Hob, who lived under the hearthstone.   "Hob lived under the hearthstone at Ghyllside Farm, but no-one had...