Jan Elisabeth Fortune

An appreciative audience met together on Thursday 23 March to celebrate two excellent poetry pamphlets, winners of our 2022 Poetry Pamphlet Award. Concrete Sea  by EA Griffiths and Treelight by Yvonne Baker explore landscape and innerscapte, each in disttinctive ways.

Walking us through a woodland with all the senses open and connecting inner and outer experience, Treelight is, as Myra Schneider says,

lyrical and spiritual … a considerable achievement

Whilst Concrete Sea interweaves short, intense lyrical pieces with concrete poems that play with form and expand our view of poetry so that:

we emerge with the sense of another’s heart-print.

On 22nd February we were delighted to launch Again Behold the Stars, the latest award-winning pamphlet from Alex Josephy.

Set in winter, 1553 in a small Italian hill town under siege, it’s a narrative of uncommon endurance and an intense immersion into a lockdown that challenges all the senses. It’s a lockdown that is utterly different from the modern experience during the Covid pandemic, yet also hauntingly resonant with it. Most vitally, the empathy evoked reaches us across almost five centuries, making us care in the present.

The launch took the form of a recorded dramatic reading with Alex supported by three superb readers: Patricia Driver worked for many years as a broadcast news journalist in Bahrain, then as a senior fundraiser at St John Ambulance and English Heritage. Since retirement, Pat has immersed herself in the Rye, East Sussex theatre scene as a director and actor. Janet Stott is involved in local theatre productions in Rye. She has loved reading aloud from an early age, and encouraged her children to do the same but with less success! Susannah Mayor is involved in theatrical productions in Rye and East Sussex, and works for the National Trust.

The launch also included questions from the appreciative audience, but sadly we had some Zoom issues so the recording is simply the reading — which is wonderful 🙂

You can find the pamphlet here

In an uncertain present, how do we plant the future?

Unmoored from the familiar, how do we come home in a strange land?

Join Helen May Williams and Jan Fortune launching Coed Cae Claer and at world’s end, begin, two pamphlets exploring our connectiions to the land we live on and our connections with the world. Written in language that is beautiful but unsentimental: full of intense, honed imagery and supple phrases. Deep attention to the cycles of life inform these pamphlets, which use haibun, haiku and lyric forms to communicate so much.

Being read to is one of the most wonderful parts of childhood and increasingly adults are realising how solacing and important it is to hear stories as well as immersing in them through books. Gather round our virtual fire for winter tales and lively discussion of the short-story form with two of Cinnamon’s finest short story writers, Adam Craig (High City Walk & Marietta Merz) and Isabelle Llasera (Smog).

Our last launch of the year was for Marie Dullaghan’s powerful collection of poetry and photography dealing with her son’s journey through living with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, a condition that comes with episodic paranoid schizophrenia: hallucinations, delusions. The book is a testimony to the human spirit and to the courage of this family, but also raises deep questions about mental health and how we make sense of challenging conditions and behaviour.

The launch was poignant, moving and honest, but also a celebration of how the journey has moved on, carrying a torch for gratitude in an uncertain world.

You can watch the video below