Saturday 4 December 2010

The Cockermouth Poems

Sometime Five Leaves' book editor (The Night Shift, On a Bat's Wing) Michael Baron is endlessly energetic, despite, or possibly because he lives so far from metropolitan poetry circles and despite, or possibly because he is not exactly a young man. He crops up in all sorts of poetry projects up in Cumbria but I think he has excelled himself with his project "The Cockermouth Poems". Michael, who lives in Cockermouth, has set up a poetry trail round the town as part of the positive ways it is responding to last year's disastrous floods. He has persuaded a great range of poets with strong or loose Cockermouth connections to contribute to the trail - a great line up. Here's the story at greater length in the Guardian books blog.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/nov/29/poets-disaster-relief-wordsworth-country
ps I should also mention his own collection of poetry - More Than a Man in a Boat, which is very good. I can't find it on Amazon but its ISBN is 978 0 9565134 0 3 so bookshops can order it. Retail is a fiver.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, that's him endlessly energetic! You should see his latest poem about Archimedes! It's hilarious. Ask him for a copy. I'm biased being related to him, but everything you say about him is true :)