Awen Publications

7.30pm for 8pm Hawkwood College, Stroud Join ecopoet Helen Moore in Stroud to celebrate the launch of her third poetry collection, The Mother Country. Helen will be supported with additional readings by local poet, Adam Horovitz, who has written extensively about his mother, and about humanity’s relationship with the landscape. Expect themes of mothers, environmentalism, postcolonialism & future generations. Free entry, drinks available to purchase The Mother Country by Helen

by Anthony Nanson I can’t yet believe he’s gone. He will leave such a big space in the healing and poetry communities of which he’s been such a leading light. He was Awen’s biggest champion, just as he championed and encouraged so many individuals on their creative and spiritual journeys. He said to me once that for him poetry and psychotherapy were essentially the same thing, equally concerned with transformation. He had no time for poetry that didn’t have some kind of trans

On 19 August 2018 we gathered in the Ale House in Stroud to celebrate two things: the launch of Awen’s newest title, Silver Branch: Bardic Poems & Letters to a Young Bard by Kevan Manwaring – and also the author’s birthday! Kevan organised the evening with his usual generosity of spirit, giving us a showcase of bardic talent from Stroud and Bath – and beyond. There were poets, musicians and storytellers sharing many different versions of the bardic arts that Kevan has worked

Jay Ramsay has made a short film about his experience of the cancer journey, including some of the poetry it has inspired. He was due to give this presentation at the AHP Conference ‘Love, Madness & Transformation’ in London on 28 June 2018, but instead filmed it at Hawkwood College, Stroud. The text will appear in the AHP journal Self & Society. You can view the film here: https://vimeo.com/277625151 #cancer #JayRamsay #Poetry

We walked alone together up the steep hillside, finding our own desire paths through the boggy heathland, climbing our own mental inclines, the hidden engines of our hearts driving us forward, the mental cable of our thoughts reeling us up the slope – providing the traction of deferred gratification. We had come the wild West Brecons to make mythopoeic pilgrimage to Llyn y Fan Fach, a glacial tarn associated with the Tylwyth Teg, the ‘Good Folk’ of the Brythonic tradition, an

by Jay Ramsay The real story, which is surely the environment now, is being masked by a puppet show diverting our attention from what urgently matters in our collective consciousness. However, every effort is being made through the best of social media to keep that story at the frontline of our awareness. Of course, our human story matters as well: we live at a time when all the world’s wrongs are being exposed in a time of transparency. This great transparency, in my view, h

Ditch Vision is a book of essays on poetry, nature, and place that extends Jeremy Hooker’s thinking on subjects that, as a distinguished critic and poet, he has made his life’s work. The writers he considers include Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts, and Frances Bellerby. Through sensitive readings of these and other writers, he discusses differences between British and American writers concerned with nature and sp

By Irina Kuzminsky June 3, Waterloo Festival, St John’s Waterloo On a spectacularly sunny English summer day some of Britain’s best poets gathered at St John’s Church Waterloo to send out their own call for awareness of the ecological crisis threatening our planet and therefore us. Sponsored, most appropriately, by the World Wildlife Fund and ARC (http://arcworld.org) and curated by poet, author and psychotherapist Jay Ramsay, Writing on the Wall was an ambitious part of the

by Anthony Nanson Charlotte Hussey’s Glossing the Spoils is rather more than a collection of poems. It will have a particular interest, not only to admirers of edgy and crisply constructed verse, but to anyone engaged with medieval romance, legend, and epic, especially in Celtic, Old English, and Arthurian traditions. Awen have now published a new edition of this book, first published in 2012, with an expanded introduction by the author in which she goes into more detail abou

By Robin Collins Britain, this great mnemonic, land of the English, Celt and flint knappers of another age. The seas wrap around her cliffs, never letting the kingdom sleep, haunting her people with the foam capped thud of waves, telling us to remember, remember. The seas carried our distant ancestors, unrecorded faces and names, making the way across, that ancient pollination of migration. Britain in the becoming, the great life stream of cultures. Without the crossing over,

By Dawn Gorman How appropriate for a Words & Ears falling on a hot, hot evening that we should find ourselves among Liz Watts’ Beached imaginings, and cooled, in the imagination if not literally, by the water-and-shady-woods imagery from Elephant’s Footprint films. That, though, was just the start of things at the Swan last week. The one-off collaboration between sculptor and film-makers produced something quite ‘other’ for the senses – the gorgeous synergies of those skies,

Here’s a poem from A Dance With Hermes: Koinos Hermes ​ The work begins and ends with him: the sly light-fingered god of crossways, transit, emails and exchange, the wing-heeled, shifty, wheeler-dealing go-between, who’ll slip right through your fingers if you try to pin him down. For he is labile, street-wise and trans-everything. He is the one two-fold hermaphrodite who’ll rise up sprightly from the earth and turn to air, and then descend into the underworld to po

By Robin Collins Let our resistance be an irresistible, bringing together of the Stars and the Earth in our lives. Let our resistance be insistence on beauty and wonder, let us be beyond the deadening repetition of machines. In all ways we are evolving towards the spiralling of creation. Spirals in the resistance will take us like starlings, murmuring through the shattering pieces of where we have come to, arrived for the first time in the middle of ourselves. Spinning in the

Poets, thinkers, writers and people who care for the natural world will gather in Waterloo on Saturday, June 3, 2017 for a unique interactive day of exploring and learning how poetry can help us protect the environment. We’re delighted to announce that a number of Awen authors will be participating in this event. Writing on the Wall is: A day of poetic action and reflection for the planet. The first in a series. A chance for new and established poets, budding writers, fans of

By Dawn Gorman It was a packed and dynamic evening last Thursday at Words & Ears, when Susan Utting and Rishi Dastidar took up the guest poet challenge, both reading from their brand new collections, Half the Human Race and Ticker-tape. Huge thanks to them, and to guest MC Sam Loveless, who had things masterfully under control in his lovely relaxed and entertaining way. The first half was, everyone was quick to tell me in the interval, ‘absolutely brilliant’ (really sorry I m

This is a poem continuing the theme of working through my illness, which has produced Surgery (Yew Tree Press, 2015), Left Field, and Al-Chemo (the last two unpublished/work in progress). This kind of writing has not only helped me explore a very deep and challenging process, it has also been very much about sharing it with others, not least because much of it is uncharted territory. All of this deepens the emphasis in Places of Truth (my main individual Awen collection so fa

In this video, Lindsay Clarke talks about poetry, language, and the imagination. This was recorded at the launch of Rosie Jackson’s ‘What the Ground Holds’ Bath UK, 1st October 2014. Here’s an interview with Lindsay Clarke talking about his novel The Water Theatre: Lindsay Clarke’s A Dance with Hermes is published by Awen – you can find it on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dance-Hermes-Lindsay-Clarke/dp/1906900434 #LindsayClarke #Poetry #videos

When Liz Watts suggested I ran an edition of Words & Ears within her ceramics installation Beached at Greenhill Cottage Gallery, I immediately said yes, because the gallery is such a wonderful space and because Liz’s work is stunning. But I didn’t anticipate it working quite so well as our Easter Monday event. That was down to a combination of things – Liz’s inspired staging of her award-winning, sea-themed ceramics; guest poet Rebecca Gethin’s superb, salt-tanged sets, which

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus. Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made is star-stuff too? – That wherever you go you can never fully disappear – dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen. Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock. Roselle Angwin Roselle Angwin has blogged about poetry and Iona here – as it’s on blospot this is the closest we can get to a re-blog! #Iona #Poetry #RoselleAngwin

Lorna Smithers, writing in 2016 for Gods and Radicals said “As I read through the pages from this year’s position of heightened crisis, I found the poems continued to resonate and feel important. Some do the essential work of critiquing the materialistic worldview of consumer capitalism responsible for our destruction of the earth.” You can read the whole review here – https://godsandradicals.org/2016/05/26/review-soul-of-the-earth/ Stardancer on Amazon says “like the eco-bar