I am grateful to Jan Heritage, editor of Finished Creatures poetry magazine, for publishing in issue 8 (Dec. 2023) a new poem of mine, 'By Design'. The poem, for an issue whose theme is 'Edge', was inspired by the dress of the figure in the artwork by Gurminder Sikand that appears on the cover of my chapbook Transmission Blues.
I'm grateful to Philip Rowland for publishing my poem 'Elegy on the Line' in Noon: Journal of the Short Poem Issue 24, p.78.
I'm very pleased to have an ekphrastic poem in issue 7 of Finished Creatures. My poem, 'Woman and Cell', is inspired by a late drawing of that title by Gurminder Sikand and by others of hers contemporaneous with it.
I am grateful to Alan Baker of Leafe Press for publishing two poems I wrote recently for a couple of special occasions. The first, 'Only Correct', appeared in an online Festschrift, edited by Alan with Andrew Taylor, for the poet Cliff Yates . The second, 'Reading at the Brasserie', was likewise produced for a celebration. Both were inspired by the voice of Gurminder Sikand.
The poet Andrew Taylor, a close family friend and colleague, has written a poem in memory of the artist Gurminder Sikand, my late wife. I am delighted to have permission to publish it here for the first time.
Makers’ Balm i.m. Gurminder Sikand The dark wing of winter & its saddest sounds from the hill a simple view to the city cold sucks the juice out of the air new shirt cuffs hide a floral pattern low sun illuminates your image amongst the books & art at home steam from tea spirals & fades I'm pleased to see that the Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing, which I edited with Alasdair Pettinger, is now avalable in paperback. At the time of posting, it and the ebook version are available on sale for the reduced price of £31.99, down from £39.99. Isabel Kalous of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany) has written a detailed review of the book. I am delighted to have been made an honorary member of La Société d’Etude de la Littérature de Voyage du monde Anglophone (SELVA), a society that aims to bring global perspectives to bear on Anglophone travel writing and to promote the study of it, I look forward to working with SELVA. Thanks to Anne-Florence Quaireau and to Samia Ounoughi.
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.
I was delighted to be invited by James Smith to contribute a chapter on travel writing to his edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s, my contributors' copies of which arrived today. Ever since my former colleague Stan Smith asked me to supply an essay on Auden's travel writing for his The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (2006), I have been fascinated by 1930s' travel writing. Among the works that interest me most are those that expose the fallibility of generalisations, admit the limitations of their point of view, and experiment with form in order to find a fit between representation and subject.
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Tim Youngs
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