🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Take off over the next six spring weeks into an airy world of birdsong, tail-feathers, swooping & soaring. Immerse yourself in an aviary of the imagination, a poetic bird-land, indulge in 'bird-ology'... 7wk creative-writing course see: tinyurl.com/taking-off-on-… art: amy guidry

Starts next Sunday, 30th March, booking now... Take off over the next six spring weeks into an airy world of birdsong, tail-feathers, swooping & soaring. Immerse yourself in an aviary of the imagination, 7wk creative-writing course see: tinyurl.com/The-Avian-Eye-…, art: andrea kowch

Delighted to see #TheNewYorker exploring (as we're doing at #coffeehousepoetry over next 7 wks in tinyurl.com/Avian-Eye-from…) how birds might be more like us than we think. Or maybe it's the other way round? Though writers, artists & myth-makers have known all along as we'll find!

Great to chat to Mark Doty, in #talkingtransatlantic, about the past winter past on his Hudson Valley farm (after years in NYC), & hear him read new poems & reflect, in conversation with Cahal Dallat, on urban v rural, form v freedom, the quotidian & the numinous, & so much more...

fri 16 may—sat 5 jul, £280: 'between the lines', a 7-wk #coffeehousepoetry masterclass with Cahal Dallat A masterclass that combines critical study with writing & workshopping new poems. Explore through each week's... see: tinyurl.com/next-between-t… art: 'facing west', rapheal crump

Poetry nights: from Bridget Jones - 'Mad About the Boy' (The Chiswick Cinema), so like a #coffeehousepoetry #poetrymonday in Troubadour cellar-club: Hugh Grant (on stage) says when he read Bridget's kids some of his girlfriend's prose poems at bedtime they 'were out like a light'💡😂

🌳 Perfect time, now trees are in bud, leaf & blossom, to discover the poetic potential of sunlit greenwood & deep dark glade... sun 27 apr—sat 28 jun, £280: root & branch: the enchantment of trees: a 7-wk creative-writing workshop see: tinyurl.com/root-and-branc… art: elena guryeva

Not your average📚book launch: super reception in splendid ballroom of London's Irish Embassy for Canongate (has left)' "The Wardrobe Department" set in West End theatreland (+ Donegal), by debut Sligo novelist Elaine Garvey: "stunning debut examining the ache we all have to belong".

🌳'Root & Branch' starts Sunday after Easter (27th): spend seven creative #coffeehousepoetry weeks in the shelter, the sundappled shade and seclusion, the mystique, memory, myth & metaphor of the sylvan psyche, the arboreal imagination... see: tinyurl.com/root-and-branc… art: geeeo

The Irish Wake⚰️Unlikely subject, on a sunny Camden afternoon, for an intriguing journey thru poetry, prose, song and story from Achill Island writer Kevin Toolis ("My Father's Wake", 2017) and Connemara singer Caitríona Ni Chennabháin💐thnx2 Innisfree Housing Association and Irish in Britain🙏

Last of the Spring'25 courses, 'Root & Branch' starts this Sunday (27th): perfect season in which to explore trees' imaginative impact, deep-rooted archetypal significance & creative/artistic/poetic potential as we segue into summer🌳 see: tinyurl.com/rootandbranch-… art: damon pla

Lovely to see The TLS's picture-choice for Cahal Dallat's piece on 'Drink to the Bird' (Benedict Kiely, intro by Paul Clements) – as birds are very much 'in the air' with my current 'Avian Eye' course: & another bird image below, re Declan Ryan's review of Colm Toibin on Bishop

Great to welcome Joyce Sutphen & Walter Cannon, Minnesotan poets, lecturers & longtime friends back to Bedford Park to see Conrad shawcross's dazzling Yeatsian gyre, #EnwroughtLight: Joyce & Walt joined us at the artwork project's launch in Chiswick's Buddhist Vihara in 2019!

One place now available on next #coffeehousepoetry 'Between the Lines' ✍️ a 7-wk creative-&-critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat, fri 16 may—sat 5 jul, £280, full details: tinyurl.com/next-between-t… email me on [email protected] asap if interested. art: 'facing west', rapheal crump

Great to welcome The Shaw Society - est.1941 to🌻#BedfordPk🌻(GBS maintained the Irish Literary Revival began here!) as they head off on a sunny Sunday afternoon tour👇among their number, #Yeats's first cousin Ida's granddaughter! Super intro to the two Irish The Nobel Prize winners by MRS SHAW HERSELF!

Early hours: breakfast reading (in sunlit seclusion of Isle-of-Purbeck stone) is Harriet Baker's 'Rural Hours: the Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann', as I'm off literary-sleuthing-wise to Bloomsbury's Wessex outpost of Chaldon Herring.

View of Kew Gardens' Palm House from the Botanical Brasserie's terrace, with Hercules wrestling the river-god Achelous in the form of a serpent, halfway across the pond...

Valentine Ackland & Sylvia Townsend Warner together (as they were from 1930 until Valentine's death) at St Nicholas, Chaldon Herring, where they met through TF Powys's literary/artistic circle: 'non omnis moriar' (not all [of me] dies) expresses hope of their writing living on!

'...the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.' (Virginia Woolf, 'To The Lighthouse') When Woolf asked Sylvia Townsend Warner how she could write so much about witches she replied 'Because I am one!' (Peacock Butterfly, St Nicholas, Chaldon Herring)🦋

The Sailor's Return, Chaldon Herring, opposite Miss Green's Cottage where Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland lived 1930-37 in a literary circle including David Garnett whose radical novel, 'The Sailor's Return', recounts a Dorset village's reaction to interracial marriage