Guest Poet: Rachael Clyne
Rachael Clyne, from Glastonbury, is a familiar reader at Words & Ears. Her early acting career started at the Bristol Old Vic, hence her love of performing. Rachael later trained as a psychotherapist which she still practises. She has written self-help books, as well as poetry. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree, is published by Indigo Dreams. Her work appears in anthologies and journals including: Tears in the Fence, Prole, The Rialto, Under the Radar, The Interpreter's House, Obsessed with Pipework, Lighthouse and Acumen. Her new pamphlet, Girl Golem is published by 4Word press, and explores her migrant heritage and sense of being other: her parents arrived in England from Ukrainian Russia in 1912 & 1914, as toddlers, with their parents. Rachael draws on family, childhood and loss, with a perspective that is quirky and peppered with humour.
Guest Poet: Janet Sutherland
Janet Sutherland was born in Wiltshire and grew up on a dairy farm. She has an MA in American Poetry from the University of Essex. Her poems are widely anthologised and have appeared in magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review, The New Humanist, The London Magazine, The New Statesman and The Spectator. In 2018 she received a Hawthornden Fellowship during which some of these poems were written. In 2017 she won the Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition. Home Farm (Shearsman Books, January 2019) is her fourth collection in which she explores the farm where she grew up; a ninety-acre dairy farm in Wiltshire, rented by her parents, where they milked 50 cows and reared heifers on the nearby water meadows. The collection examines the farm as home from early beginnings to the farm auction at the end of their working lives. In 2018 she received Arts Council funding to recreate her great great grandfather's trip to Hungary and Serbia, writing her own journal to mirror his which were written in 1846 and 1847. This will be the subject of future new work. (Author photo by Tom Reeves)
25th April 2019, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN
The Coach House was filled to the brim with people and poems last night - thank you everyone for sharing your words & ears. Especial thanks to Rachael Clyne and Janet Sutherland, whose work sat so well together, addressing their very different matters of family and place with equal grace. There was humour, soul, and political comment both here and in the open mic - my thanks to contributors there, including John Hawkhead, Shirley Wright, Deborah Harvey, Dominic Fisher, Mark Sayers, Tom Forrest, Frances-Anne King, Paul Brokensha, B Anne Adriaens, Kieron Bacon, Rosie Jackson, Rose Flint, Linda Saunders, Russ Berry (one of our Poem on a Beermat finalists from a few years ago, in the area on a visit), Lindsey Shaw-Miller, Jinny Fisher, Bernie Howley and Peter Iveson.
