ELLE A VERSE NOVEL Reviewed

I’m pleased to announce that Billy Mills has reviewed my latest book, Elle – a verse novel on his impressive blog.

The review may be read here: Two Broken Sleeps – Elliptical Movements.

 

I thought his description of the main ‘character’ spot on: ‘And then there’s the titular Elle, or “She”, Belle without the B, who is both a character and not one, and who merges at times with Christine, the woman murdered in the Brighton story.’ The text is based on Belle de Jour and 'the Brighton story' is of a terrible murder. I particularly hope other readers will concur with Billy’s reflection: ‘What the book achieves, in the end, is to replace the double victimhood of Christine, once at the hand of her husband and again at the hands of his judge and jury, with a sense of her power, of her being, in spite of everything, in control of her choices.’ 

I describe the process of writing the ‘novel’ here, with some account of the backstory that is described in more detail in the book’s ‘Afterword’: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition. I also described the book again, on its publication, here: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.  

‘It’s a tour-de-force of a book,’ Billy concludes, ‘in which Sheppard makes the verse novel his own.’

Elle may be bought here: Robert Sheppard - Elle, a Verse Novel | Broken Sleep Books.

 

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. I am going to blog one poem and photograph (and maybe more) once a month, as the project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public. 

We are in discussion about how to present text and image, but for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ we shall present poems and images that relate quite closely together.

Here is a piece from quite early in the sequence and an image to accompany it.

 

 Holme Fell 4

 

Heavy blue-grey clouds

low over russet-green pines

surround the old quarry reservoir,

the rock ground peppered with snow.

 

The water’s surface is frozen,

broken in places, a slow thaw.

The blue-white peaks of the Langdale Pikes

draw back from this arrangement,

a lone tree stretching something like human scale.

 

My father refused to enter forests and thickets

and he’d have turned away from

the darkening embrace of this wood, preferring

cricket-pitch open spaces, though this frozen expanse

would have also reminded him of the Polish death march.

 

There’s nobody about, it seems at first,

but the place is humanised

in unprogrammable ways,     

                                                by looking.

 

Zoom in, and you’ll spot two people

                                                one in a blue coat

coming out from the wood, following

the exposed bank of the reservoir.

Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.