Inside Stonework: A Q&A With Our Featured Poets
This Friday (3rd October), we’re thrilled to be launching our very first poetry anthology, put together following our themed summer open call. The quality of submissions we received was exceptional, allowing us to create a collection of remarkable variety and depth. We’re so grateful to the poets who entrusted us with their work and helped bring this book into being.
To celebrate launch day, we’d like to introduce you to some of the voices behind Stonework — and ask them the questions we’ve all been wondering!
What inspired your poem for Stonework?
Ellen Forkin - Dry-Stane Dyke, p.7
My wonderful Dad was dry-stone waller for many years; he now has early onset dementia. My poem explores his unique legacy of stone.
Naomi Madlock - Sanctum, p.8
I was working on a horse farm in British Columbia, far from comfort, and needed a place to cry. Every word of the poem is true.
Daniel Nixon - After the whiteout, p.11
I live on the southern edge of the Peak District, and a walk in the snow across a ridge called The Roaches is what sparked the first few lines.
Sam Harvey - Maeshowe, p.13
This poem, centred on the burial cairn in Orkney – Maeshowe – was inspired by a discovery that sound waves within the cairn produce mysterious effects in the human ear that are unique to the archaeoacoustics of neolithic stone monuments, particularly cairns. The final lines are quoted from a runic inscription on the inside of the main chamber of the cairn.
Tim Godden - Way Stone, p.17
My poem was inspired by many walks on the National Trust estate that I am lucky enough to live on. In particular the beginning to so many other walks that is only a few minutes from my front door. Through a thin line of woods, across the edge of a field rutted by winter rains, back into a copse onto ground softened by generations of leave fall, and out to where the blackberry bushes thrive along the path’s edge. Just there is where the stone that inspired my poem can be found.
Carl Walsh - sweep these lanes, p.21
Some of my first memories are of Marlborough, Wiltshire (where my grandparents lived) and its surrounds. I was there (from Australia) for my third birthday - and remember climbing Silbury Hill in the rain. On subsequent visits in the 80s, I'd walk up from my Gran's house, cross a bridge over the disused railway, and up into Savernake Forest. This is a poem about all that.
Paul atten Ash - Coal Mine Canary Requiems, p.24
My poem is an ekphrastic response to ‘Canary resuscitator’ (Object Number: 1930-635), an aluminium animal air tester, as used by rescue parties in mines: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co44207/canary-resuscitator-resuscitator (Science Museum Group. Canary resuscitator. 1930-635 Science Museum Group Collection Online)
Marcelle Newbold - My son asks what ‘mother tongue’ means, p.27
During a regular workshop I attended led by Marjorie Lofti, she discussed various types of mother tongue – not just linguistic, but practical and spiritual as well. As one of my strands of writing is about inheritance, it was fun to explore what my 'mother tongue' may be.
Lue Mac - Ammonite, p.33
‘Ammonite’ is one solution to a formal challenge I set myself: to write a poem where the sounds of each line create a spiralling pattern, with alternating lines (1&3, 2&4 etc.) sonically reversing each other. The repetition is more echo than stencil, in the same way that spirals stretch a single form through different levels and directions.
Victoria Spires - Bøyabreen, p.34
I visited family in Norway in August 2024 and was absolutely blown away by the geography and geology of the place. As a child of the fens, spending a brief but very concentrated and intense time amongst the very real and physical evidence of how water and rock shape the world around us was completely transformational for me and my writing, and I am still working through it now (and hope to be for many years to come!)
What fuels your writing?
Ellen Forkin
The intense need to create – to get poems, stories, ideas, memories and emotions out of my head and into the world.
Naomi Madlock
It almost always begins with a moment of epiphany. When I discovered the stone silo and its chorus of tree frogs, everything else vanished. I knew I had climbed inside a poem.
Daniel Nixon
So much! Music, nature, other great poems, novels.
Sam Harvey
Recently I came across John Keats’ writing on what he calls ‘negative capability’. To me, this refers to the process of writing despite / in pursuit of uncertainty. I often feel that when I don’t want to write it’s because I’m afraid of stepping into the unknown and having no control over what I’m doing, so I do nothing. But since reading about negative capability, I’ve come to believe that stepping into the unknown is the whole point. To do something, to act, even when you have no idea what you’re doing, is time better spent than doing nothing at all.
Tim Godden
I am fascinated by landscape and memory, by the footprints left by others and the ones we leave ourselves. It is the layering of stories on a landscape that I like to consider when I am writing, themes that relate to the experience of a place, be they fleeting or permanent.
Carl Walsh
My writing is often fuelled by travel or – in this case – the memory of travel. Being somewhere new is almost always inspiring!
Paul atten Ash
My response to navigating the climate tragedy as a father to two young children.
Marcelle Newbold
Wonder, and the importance of noticing, especially within these times of awful world events, also evidencing existence for those things that may be lost – specific names within the natural world, grace, timeline connections.
Lue Mac
Mostly meeting some weird critter, human, animal, vegetable or mineral, and trying to figure out what makes them tick.
Victoria Spires
Sudden whims and obsessions, a willingness (in fact a need) to open myself to the universe and the things within it that need calling to attention at any given moment.
If you were a stone or a rock, what kind would you be?
Ellen Forkin
I would be a folkloric hag stone – In my writing and art, I hope to give glimpses of things otherwise unseen!
Naomi Madlock
Just an ordinary pebble: worn, flawed, but cool against the palm. A talisman you can hold in your pocket. At least, that’s what I aspire to be.
Daniel Nixon
Probably a pebble on some little cove on the coast of Italy. I could just spend my time sunbathing and listening to the waves.
Sam Harvey
One of the Blarney Stones in this Mary Wallopers song - those stones have the gift of the gab!
Tim Godden
Portland Stone. It has formed an important part of my life, and experience of life. My relationship with it has presented me with so many life-changing opportunities that I feel both connected and grateful to it. I have pieces of it in my studio that I like to hold; I love how the history compressed into its creation still make themselves visible. So much of what Portland stone is and how it came to be is reflected in all my creative practice.
Carl Walsh
I think – given my love of standing stones – I'll have to be a sarsen from the Marlborough Downs...
Paul atten Ash
A meteorite that has fallen to the surface of a moon of Saturn. I am endlessly fascinated by Saturn and its moons, having co-composed the brooding, often soaring and searching odyssey of dark electronica that is the concept album Saturnian: https://blackfordhill.bandcamp.com/album/saturnian
Marcelle Newbold
Great question! With my children we often pick up a 'special' pebble each from a beach trip – when we find one that feels right, and calls to us. Size, shape, weight, temperature and patterning all matter. I'd be tumbled for sure, not pressure folded, perhaps a striped sandstone…
Lue Mac
Hard to answer without accidentally revealing some unexamined psychological issue. Although this is more a broad category of stone, I think I would be an 'erratic' -- a stone carried far away from its geological home by currents, tides or ice sheets, cropping up on a beach somewhere it doesn't belong and thinking, well, I guess this is where I am.
Victoria Spires
Feldspar, because I love how it sounds.
What are you reading currently?
Ellen Forkin
I’m currently reading a few Carol Ann Duffy poetry books, I love her poems enormously. Also, I just started the novel Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen which so far is brilliant.
Naomi Madlock
I’ve been rereading Richard Scott’s new collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, making extensive notes – perhaps to the point of obsession. My three-word review: harrowing, intricate, vital.
Daniel Nixon
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. All fun stuff!
Sam Harvey
Richard Poirer’s Poetry and Pragmatism. He applies Emersonian pragmatism to poetic practice by framing poetry as a kind of action towards vagueness and confusion. For Poirer, poetry isn’t something great artists take up to clarify or give meaning to the great questions in life. Instead, it’s a space for accidental provocation and agitation, where readers and writers come together without knowing where they’ll end up, and enjoy a journey in language without map or directions.
Tim Godden
I’m not really one for reading a single book at a time, but rather I have several on the go that allow me to dip in and out depending on my mood. At the moment I’m reading either The Lost Paths by Jack Cornish, Forgotten Churches by Luke Sherlock, or Wild Folk by Tamsin Abbott and Jackie Morris.
Carl Walsh
I'm currently reading Yukio Mishima's Thirst for Love. I've been reading predominantly Japanese authors (in translation) since 2018.
Paul atten Ash
Variously: Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Ambient Receiver Issue 2, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal Issue 11, among others.
Marcelle Newbold
Woman's Lore, 4000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi by Sarah Clegg.
Lue Mac
Way too many things in one go. Non-fiction: The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Fiction: Northanger Abbey. Poetry: Francis Ponge.
Victoria Spires
Novel – Waterland by Graham Swift (back to my fen origins!). Poetry – David Harsent, John Burnside, Katrina Moinet, Dorian Nightingale, Rhian Evans, Laura Theis, Paul Brookes, many more