This weekend it’s Poetry in Aldeburgh. And yes, it’s going to be quite different this year – which means virtual chips on the virtual beach for us.

But we will be THERE and supporting the amazing @luciadove – whose work on the east coast floods of 1953 we’ll be publishing next year. You can get a preview of it at midday on Sunday, via Zoom, via the Poetry in Aldeburgh website. Lucia is reading as one of four poets at a 12pm Sunday session titled Place and Memory.

From the Poetry in Aldeburgh site: Place and Memory
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How much of a place do we carry with us into the future? And how does the memory of place ripple down across generations?

Lucia Dove has been working on a project that explores the relationship between Essex and the Netherlands through their geographical landscape and shared cultural memory of the North Sea flood of 1953 which devastated both places on the same night. Her debut pamphlet Say cucumber leads you into a world that slips between the familiar and unfamiliar.

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy – the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of Return by Minor Road. Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, she revisits where ‘the occasional endures’.

Psychotherapist Alan Buckley’s Touched is a debut collection that understands the value of subtlety and restraint, exploring personal trauma and the “fragile, desperate weight” of our lives through poems that speak elegantly of hard-won insight’ (Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian). “The sea, the sea, always recommencing” wrote the great French poet Paul Valéry. 

Jennifer Edgecombe’s debut pamphlet The Grief of The Sea is an exploration of loss and its relationship with the ocean, the two eternally bound together. These poems showcase her exceptional ability to evoke taste, touch, sound, and most of all, depth of feeling.