You may know that my new poetry book, Holme Fell: a sample of landscapes, a collaboration with the photographer Trev Eales, is now published. (There are lots of posts here.) This hardback volume consists of many colour photographs and texts, beautifully presented to enhance the double reading and viewing experience. The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them. As I said last night: 'The poems are responses to the photographs rather than to the landscape itself. Landscapes have boundaries; photographs have borders.'
Ian McMillan on Bluesky: ‘So good to experience this meeting of poetry and photography by@robertsheppard.bsky.social and Trev Eales from the always exciting Knives Forks and Spoons Press. “A crackle of purple twiglets/against ice-blue mountains, blue clouds:”’
Details here:
Holme Fell : Robert Sheppard (author), : 9781916590243 : Blackwell's
I’ve found that everyone who has seen the book is deeply impressed. I’ve tried to convey its physicality in the video on this blogpost:
Pages: TREV EALES AND ROBERT SHEPPARD: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes PUBLISHED NOW!
Wed 8 Jul, 7-8.30pm: Trev (showing the images) and me (reading) took part in an evening of live poetry with James Byrne, Jesse Hill, and Chris McCabe. Supported by Liverpool Poetry Space, this event brought together four distinctive voices, each presenting live readings of new and recent work in an intimate setting. Books were for sale! I now have each of the auhtors' books.
About the readers and books
James Byrne launches his new collection The Banality of Power, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, published by Broken Sleep Books.
Jesse Hill is a transdisciplinary researcher and poet, creating ecologically-rooted projects shaped by seasonal cycles and our queer relationship with the breathing world. They teach Creative Writing at Edge Hill University whilst working on their PhD. A new book is out from Broken Sleep Books, Seedwork (On Breaking Open).
Chris McCabe‘s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He’s the author of six poetry collections - the latest in Hedonism from Nine Arches Press, described by The Guardian as showing ‘the full muscle and gristle of lived language.
Trev Eales & Robert Sheppard
It was a great evening, and I've little energy to describe: how Trev and I showed the images and text; how Jesse read from her new Broken Sleep book Seedwork (On Breaking Open), a calendar of the year, relating to self-discovery concerning ecology and sexuality and the connections between; how Chris read from Hedonism poems about Europe, plus some new poems about Europe, and his and our relation to it; how James effortlessly read quite grim material regarding corporate and societal evil as an organised inhuman and inhumane nexus...
I usually include a set-list, but this one is simply the numbers of the poems I read from the book. If you have the book it might make some sense:
Holme Fell 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, Hodge Close 2, 3, 4, Holme Fell 27, 28.
We all sold books. This Liverpool Poetry Space is a damned good idea. I was there at the preliminary stages.
