People in a Landscape: Poetry for a Summer’s Evening
Paul Hyland, Catherine Simmonds, Frances Hatch, Pam Zinnemann-Hope
Wednesday 10 July, 8pm. Doors 7.30pm
Tickets: £12 poetry only or £30 with delicious buffet dinner from 6pm
Please phone 01308 459511 to book now
There will be four slots for poems from the floor on the theme. Not more than 50 lines each. Please email Pam: pam@zhope.co.uk if you would like to take part.
Paul Hyland
Paul Hyland is a poet, travel author and biographer. Four of his books – about Purbeck, Congo, India, Portugal – have been Books of the Year in UK and US newspapers.
Ralegh’s Last Journey (HarperCollins) was described by John Simpson as ‘an absolute jewel’. His work has been broadcast on BBC2 and on BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4.
Paul has published six poetry collections, including his selected poems, Art of the Impossible (Bloodaxe).
Catherine Simmonds
Catherine Simmonds lives in Shaftesbury and has written poems reflecting the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth.
She has collaborated with landscape painter Rachel Sargent on four exhibitions of paintings and poems, the most recent: Far West – drew on the unique landscape of Cape Cornwall, where they were both in residence at the artist’s house Brisons Veor. As part of her poetry M.A she produced a sequence of poems exploring the sources of the Arthurian legends.
During the celebrations of the Poetry Society’s centenary, she took part in a residency for the National Trust at Max Gate and Thomas Hardy’s cottage in collaboration with three other Wessex poets, writing poems inspired by Hardy’s prose. The performance, with Paul Hyland and Pam Zinnemann-Hope was
“One of the best poetry readings I have attended.” Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times
Pam Zinnemann-Hope
Pam Zinnemann-Hope’s first collection, On Cigarette Papers, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize & adapted by her for The Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, in which she also acted, alongside Eleanor Bron, Greg Wise, Emma Fielding et al. The poems tell of her parents’ escape from Nazi Germany and begins with the discovery of ‘fifty pencilled recipes / on cigarette papers, in Russian’. The story ranges across Europe, from Hitler’s Germany through imprisonment in the Stalin Purges to England where her parents were interned on the Isle of Mann as ‘Enemy Aliens’. It ends in 1995.
Pam’s second collection, Foothold, travels through the seasons and ecology in Thomas Hardy territory, through deep time, music and love in old age. Some poems have been set by the composer David Dubery & by Pam’s husband, Peter Hope. Pam is also a children’s author.
Frances Hatch
Frances Hatch’s paintings are currently showing at Sladers Yard as part of the Igniting Sight exhibition of contemporary artists inspired by JMW Turner.
She writes: ‘I have always woven words and images in my sketchbook pages. Making shape in word as well through images has evolved quite organically. Only recently have I called them poems. These written responses to the experience of landscape and life events beyond the sketchbook page have become integrated into my plein air practice’. Frances has selected poems to reflect the spirit of the show.
Wednesday 10 July 7.30pm. Tickets: £12 or £30 with a delicious buffet dinner from 6pm.
Please call 01308 459511 for tickets.
The Hornets Nest by Catherine Simmonds
For Matthew Cutts
After Hardy’s An August Midnight
We watched them
in the still light, still dark wood,
talked about their way of building –
paper thin – their love of light
making them impossible to live with,
how they couldn’t be driven back from the night-lit house.
I was glad they were in the yew tree
what walls – what a labyrinth they own –
what darkness, where they cannot come to harm.
Later, as you lit the candles, I thought of them again
blurring, gentle, closed-in
like the old saints in the bodies of the trees.
Sladers Yard 
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