by John Bevis | Jul 26, 2020 | A view from the Iron Bridge
The starting point of my latest collection, Letter-winged Kite, was the discovery of this simple fact: every bird in the world has a common English name. That strikes me as extraordinary. A scientific name, yes: every bird, every living thing, has been tagged with a...
by John Bevis | Jan 20, 2020 | A view from the Iron Bridge
Over the past century or so, since found poetry has been a ‘thing’, texts have been sourced largely from printed matter in all its diversity, from an auctioneer’s catalogue (Thomas A Clark) to Fishing News (Ian Hamilton Finlay) to a Victorian novel (Tom Philips)...
by John Bevis | Jan 13, 2020 | A view from the Iron Bridge
I’m in my Shropshire garden, an untidy patch whose lower slopes were last seen pitching into woods somewhere toward the River Severn. The rain stopped a little while ago, and the air’s full of that sweet smell of wet foliage, the hazy patter of water droplets shaking...
by John Bevis | Jan 6, 2020 | A view from the Iron Bridge
I’m visiting Doncaster, where I drop in to the library in Bawtry to do some work and, out of habit, become a member. Bawtry is a community library, and the volunteer who processes my application is keen to show what it has to offer. On our way round, she points out a...
by John Bevis | Dec 31, 2019 | A view from the Iron Bridge
The cover of Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems, Gallop, reproduces Franz Marc’s ‘Two Horses, 1912.’ And there recurs, in the backbeat of these welcoming verses, a vision of an enviable life of rural concerns around not only horses but bicycles and birds and radios,...
by John Bevis | Dec 16, 2019 | A view from the Iron Bridge
There have been armies of journalists out on the streets of Britain in the lead up to the December, 2019, general election. They’ve been dropping in on deprived areas, places where the demographic is out of step, where the statistics ring alarm notes, where political...
