I am grateful to Peter Thabit Jones for publishing four of my poems in issue 32 (Summer/Autumn 2020) of The Seventh Quarry magazine. The poems are loosely linked in their concern with proximity and distance. Three of them are travel-themed. 'Sign' results from a break on the north Norfolk coast four or five years ago. 'Archived' arises from a conversation with Dr Jenny Gaschke of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, who kindly showed me a notebook of the artist William James Müller (1812-1845). (I shall be posting that poem online and linking to it here at a later date.) 'Procession', a whimsical metaphysical exercise in sibilance, follows several stays in the vicinity of St Paul's Cathedral in London. 'Reading Wendell Berry' records life outside the page ending up on it. Perhaps in revised form, one or two of these poems may end up in my second pamphlet, which I hope to put together this summer.
Like many others, I have thought often about travel while observing the restrictions on movement imposed in response to the current pandemic. A recent invitation from Cambridge University Press to contribute a post on travel writing to their blog series 'Cambridge Reflections: Covid-19' was therefore welcome, as was the chance to collaborate once again with Charles Forsdick. Our brief for 'Extending the confines of travel' was to offer reflections on how the situation has affected our view of our research subject.
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Tim Youngs
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