River Suite (Devon Arts In Schools Initiative) compact disc, and pamphlet; the new limited edition book, out in 2011, is a lavish and beautiful book with the poem interspersed with Vikky Minette's superb water photography
I was commissioned by DAISI in 1999 to write a long Devon poem, which would be interpreted by students in nine Devon schools (primary and secondary) working with three musician composers: Hywel Davies, Pete Rosser and Philip Robinson. I chose to start the piece at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, and followed the journey of a Devon river to the sea. The resulting work was then performed and recorded. CD: this is a reading of the poem only, without music.
EXCERPT:
1
you find yourself here again
as if in dream
this bleak bog
black and ochre home to cotton grass and kestrels
shaped flints, a sheep's skull
in the absences where small deaths press
(scatter of fleece like dirty snow
a spike of bone, a tangled wreath of feather and sinew)
where the winds prowl
where the buzzard's cry falls through space
and there's no ear but your own to catch it
easy to believe you're at the edges of the earth
that you might forget your name
and no-one to call it
here darkness waits close at hand
shadowing the day
the way a nightmare tracks you
just a tangle of voices
(you shiver)
maybe the long dead criss-crossing the heavy air
tinners hunters tribesmen
whose lives have littered this land
for thousands of years
flesh become bogcotton, mouse and mud
or a wild baying like the hounds of hell
your own fear following you
like a grey wolf
ghosting your footsteps
here where the heart of Devon clenches tight
and squeezes out its arteries
like arteries clotted with granite
Dart and Tavy
Teign and Taw and Ockment
opening from the earth's dark magma
like creases in the palm of a hand
we are made of all this
peat-bog and granite
slate and the soft red sandstone that yields to the sea's caress
water
you're unwinding these stories
down from the iron-black night of the moor...
Most titles are available from Roselle (to contact her click here), or to order from your local bookshop.
Writing the Bright Moment – inspiration & guidance for writers (Arts Council/Fire in the Head 2005)
For the Fire in the Head spirit in print, here are 14 years' worth of ideas and exercises, guaranteed to set your fingertips tingling... This is an inspiring sourcebook with stimulating discussions, essays, ideas, practical exercises and examples for living the writing life: seeing, listening, staying awake, connecting with the passing moment (bright or dark), and using perception, observation, imagination and good writing practice to create, shape and refine poetry, story, essay, journalling and everything in between. Contributions also from some of Britain's most exciting writers and workshop leaders: Andy Brown, Rose Flint, Keith Jafrate, Ken Jones, David Keefe, Andie Lewenstein, Rupert Loydell, Paul Matthews, Chris North, Stephen Parr, Mario Petrucci, Jane Spiro, Kenneth Steven & Jeremy Thres.
Price £12.99 plus £2.50 p&p (birthday or Christmas present for writing family or friends... or for you?) from PO Box 17, Yelverton, Devon, PL20 6YF, cheques payable to R L Angwin, or from Amazon or bookshops.
Writing The Bright Moment – inspiration and guidance for writers
REVIEWS
Like the philosopher Simone Weil, another great teacher, Angwin is dedicated to encouraging the arts of reading, looking, listening, and of reflection, of really paying attention – arts which can be developed – as input to the writing. And, like her book, she is truly an inspiration.
(Katherine Gallagher)
A hugely sensory experience. Sometimes a collection of poems has the stamp of a particular geography or a history, or it broadcasts a tapestry of images and sounds woven intricately together. Voices stream through particular places and I feel as if I am transported into and beyond the physical dimension of the places in the poem. It is a hugely sensory experience which immediately grabs me and I find myself hungering for each and every sense in the whirlpool of excitements.
(Julius Smit)
Wonderful poetry, rooted in place. I was really impressed with this collection.
(R Williams)
Poems that you can touch, taste and feel. Be ready to be stirred by Roselle Angwin's latest poetry collection.
(A Hobbs)
... not a single word out of place, everything beautifully judged and all sounding so right – and so much to say on top of all that too. What a wonderful music... a confident, assured, and utterly engaging lyric voice. Great images, and a totally cogent sound world.
(Andy Brown)
Riding The Dragon - Myth and the Inner Journey (Element/Vega/Anova) as quoted on Radio 4's 'Something Understood'. An exploration of the continuing impact of myth on our lives, from the viewpoint of archetypal psychology. (Philosophy / psychology / green spirituality / mythology.) First edition (1994) almost sold out; some second-hand copies occasionally available from me at £15 plus £2 p&p (collectors' items now!). New editions from Chrysalis Books/Vega and Anova available from bookshops or amazon..
The power of myth has long held a fascination for people... Following on in the tradition of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly, Roselle Angwin shows how an understanding of myth can be applied in a practical way to transform your life and being. Through visualisation, dreamwork, ceremony and myth she takes you on an inner journey, opening the gate to the treasure house of your unconscious and the world of Soul. At each stage there is clear, sympathetic advice and there are carefully created exercises to light you along the path to discovering your own mythology, which can enrich your experience of life in general.
Riding the Dragon includes:
Preparing for your journey and the nature of sacred space
Exploring your inner realms and the nature of myth as a path to inner healing and truth
An exploration of a shamanic approach to life
Telling your own mythic story and building a positive myth-message
An exploration of the continuing relevance of ancient myth today.
Creative Novel Writing (Robert Hale Ltd.) Everything you need to know! A comprehensive handbook with exercises, based on Roselle's first course of the same title. Press reviews: 'Well-structured, easy to read and ... brutally honest.' 'Thorough. All the categories are well laid out and explained in an easy way. Nicely put together.' From your bookshop, or direct at £12.99 hardback, £9.99 paperback; plus £2 p&p
There are two sorts of writers: the dabbler, and the compulsive. If you belong to the second category, and if you know that you have a novel inside you waiting to be freed, then this is the book for you.
Good creative writing, Roselle Angwin believes, is the product of an alchemical encounter between creative imagination, the form or vehicle it takes, and 'factor x'. This book is unique amongst 'how to' books in that it addresses not only style and structure, but also the core - the imagination, and the creation of the conditions in which 'factor x' may occur.
The book is also thoroughly practical; its basis is course material tried and tested in Roselle's highly successful 'A Novel In Two Terms' course. Through section headings such as 'hunting and gathering', 'pain and passion', 'memories, dreams, reflections' and 'where do ideas come from?' as well as 'viewpoint', 'plot', 'character' and 'dialogue', this book will tempt, guide, seduce and bully you into finding your own imaginative voice for the story you want to tell.
Here indeed is a novel-writing book which truly covers new ground.
A Hawk Into Everywhere (co-authored with Rupert Loydell, Stride) Collaborative sequence of 100 prose poems/haibun. Review: 'Roselle Angwin and Rupert Loydell have enhanced each other's fluency and responsiveness, in a generous sphere of collaborative practice and exchange. These prose poems flow outwards in new directions, with refreshing perceptual shapes. New perspectives evolve through the writers' interplay, each complementing and developing the other very well.' First edition nearly sold out; a couple of copies still at £6.95 plus £1 p&p
EXCERPTS:
29. Heart of Sand
Flavours, colours, names of the winds. Mistral, scirocco, tramontana, migrating over land masses, oceans. Contagious; madness, anxiety, restlessness, unspecified yearning. Salt-foam and fish of the blustering westerlies; sherbet-stainless-steel of the tricksy easterlies, setting horses skittering. The wind off the Urals that flattened the Fens and the fenlanders. Your car misted one morning with red Saharan dust; wind-skirts full of swallows, laden with odour of spices and rose. The dark tents of the Bedouin rocking with reek of camel dung, hashish, incense. Indigo and aubergine nights. Grit that gets into your eyes and makes you ache all through.
Villages in flames, forgotten meanings, the etiquette of rejection
53. Currents and Swells
Walking barefoot on singing sand; searching for a moment that might be enough. In the village old men take the air. Tide's out. Lone white egret balances, gazing seawards. I'm puzzled by a bin chalked eggs / suck / quail. Lanes thick with lemon balm; first silage cut, squatting black shrink-wrapped bales. Dog roses flickering; on the pond waterlilies float like origami boats. The day's still life. I'm trying to process experience into meaning and language; catching moments already gone, like the plane invisible above, off which sun glances at x thousand feet. Something to stand between us and oblivion.
Eyes grown used to the haunting of interior landscape
The Present Where (pamphlet; co-authored with Rupert Loydell; Spirit Level) A six-part prose poem sequence, turning on question, reflection, contemplation, memory - real and imagined - and dream. £2.50 plus 50p p&p
EXCERPT:
She has said she dreams in colour. You are reading how volcanoes can change the sunsets for a year. How colours can mock our days. We inhabit a myth of darkness and alienation; we forget how to bloom and the budding almonds are a betrayal of our ingrained grief.
A shadowy memory of the cathedral falls across your pages; a vast cavern: gold leaf, cobalt, madder, rose, red lead. Gloom.
Because we have refused the dark we cannot bear the light...
Avebury - walking the serpent path (Chrysalis) Avebury is Europe's largest earthwork: an astonishing landscape temple, older, less well-known and more potent than Stonehenge. This long poetic sequence is a musing on life, the universe and the ghosts of stones, written as Roselle walked the processional path. Limited edition; a few copies available. £3 plus 50 p p&p
EXCERPT:
the journey
taking the serpent path
- Fyfield, Overton (the Sanctuary), West Kennett
(with its cargo of dead, long digested
into the sarsen-chambered dust)
where the land thrusts its
hummocky wombs at the wide sky
pushes up chalk and flint and bone
while beside me on the A4
the army snakes its tanks
to some imagined destiny of bloodshed ('conflict resolution')
another fiction of winning
here where we all lose
where all our stories dissolve in the end
- this five and a half thousand year old dust
- forgetting is so long
- nodding Michaelmas daisies
roadside buckets of chrysanths
(dusty pinks, pomegranate, rust)
the lapwings are back, rising in clouds
from the chalkfawn ploughland
(tumbled with tides of flint
or raucous with rooks)...
Source - 'Sanctuary' and 'Healing Spring' cassette tape These two meditations are designed to bring relaxation to the listener, gently interspersing guided visualisations with appropriate music composed by sound artist David Eastoe. They have been used with some success as a therapeutic aid in illness and insomnia. A few cassettes available. £6 plus £1 p&p
River Suite (Devon Arts In Schools Initiative) compact disc, and pamphlet
Roselle was commissioned by DAISI in 1999 to write a long Devon poem, which would be interpreted by students in nine Devon schools (primary and secondary) working with three musician composers: Hywel Davies, Pete Rosser and Philip Robinson. She chose to start the piece at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, and followed the journey of a Devon river to the sea. The resulting work was then performed and recorded. CD: this is a reading of the poem only, without music.
CD and pamphlet £4 each plus £1 p&p
EXCERPT:
1
you find yourself here again
as if in dream
this bleak bog
black and ochre home to cotton grass and kestrels
shaped flints, a sheep's skull
in the absences where small deaths press
(scatter of fleece like dirty snow
a spike of bone, a tangled wreath of feather and sinew)
where the winds prowl
where the buzzard's cry falls through space
and there's no ear but your own to catch it
easy to believe you're at the edges of the earth
that you might forget your name
and no-one to call it
here darkness waits close at hand
shadowing the day
the way a nightmare tracks you
just a tangle of voices
(you shiver)
maybe the long dead criss-crossing the heavy air
tinners hunters tribesmen
whose lives have littered this land
for thousands of years
flesh become bogcotton, mouse and mud
or a wild baying like the hounds of hell
your own fear following you
like a grey wolf
ghosting your footsteps
here where the heart of Devon clenches tight
and squeezes out its arteries
like arteries clotted with granite
Dart and Tavy
Teign and Taw and Ockment
opening from the earth's dark magma
like creases in the palm of a hand
we are made of all this
peat-bog and granite
slate and the soft red sandstone that yields to the sea's caress
water
you're unwinding these stories
down from the iron-black night of the moor...
Hestercombe (Genius Loci) Beautiful blue handbound artists' limited edition chapbook of haiku-like poems and original cyanotype prints from Hestercombe Gardens, Somerset. £20 plus £2 p&p
EXCERPT:
guidelines for a visit
enter the green eye of the woods
sit very still
wait as long as it takes
fall into silence, keep falling
drop into the depths
find the stillpoint
Taking Light (Oasis) Broadsheet of 11 poems. £1 plus 50p p&p.
What I want from a Poem is available as a pamphlet: £4, inc. p&p
Moor Poets Vol 1 (Wylde 2004) is a collection of Dartmoor-inspired poems; Roselle is included and was also one of the editors. A number of her students also have work in this anthology.
Roselle's articles, poems, reviews and short stories are widely published and have won awards. In 2003 a number of Roselle's poems (alongside luminaries such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti) appeared in a new anthology Shamanic Warriors Now; some are included in another anthology, In the Presence of Sharks (2006) and in Into the Further Reaches (2007). In the last two years, more poems have appeared in anthologies from Shearsman and Pendulum Press
All content copyright © Roselle Angwin 2007/10