AN ANTHOLOGY of poems, both local and worldwide, modern and traditional, has been gathered by Ann Pilling, a writer who lives in Gayle, with proceeds from sales going to St Margaret’s Church in Hawes.
The test of a good book of poetry is the urge to keep quoting the poems rather than commenting on them, and this is no exception.
It’s an eclectic collection, Shakespeare and Hardy and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. . .”) rubbing shoulders, or pages, with Bob Dew, who came to the Rookhurst launch and read Engine, his paean to – well, engines, which “would speak, if we believed, of the divine”.
Say Cheese! is not a haphazard collection but a deliberate and possibly unique one as Ann, an award-winning author and poet herself, has tried throughout to twin the works, putting Shakespeare, for example, with a modern, local poet, or D H Lawrence’s I Like Rats alongside M R Peacocke’s The Lambs.
Everyone will have a favourite. Mine is the opening one, James Elroy Flecker’s To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence: “Since I can never see your face, And never shake you by the hand, I send my soul through time and space To greet you. You will understand.”
Say Cheese! is published by Rookhurst Press, £8.
Betsy Everett
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