Thanks very much for signing up to my newsletter. Here’s the bookish or book-adjacent bits and pieces that have been occupying me over the past few weeks. (You can find more of this kind of thing on my website, too)

New books published this month!

I’m so delighted to see the fruits of my lockdown heading out into bookshops this month! If you’d like a copy of Wonder: The Natural History Museum Poetry Book dedicated to a nature lover, or a Book of Cat or Dog Poems inscribed to Aunt Margery and her menagerie, the wonderful folk at Haslemere Bookshop can take your order here, you can let them know about the dedication via email here, and I’ll drop in and sign them to be posted out to you. If you’re in a hurry, order by Tuesday as I’ll be signing the first batch then!

(Dare I say they would all make excellent Christmas presents? Oh yes, I went there.)

The Natural History Museum: still amazing

Growing up near to London, we seemed to spend most of our school trips at the Natural History Museum and I still remember the awe inspired by its cavernous halls stuffed with strange and wild treasures. (Also, the absolute thrill of having a little money to spend in the gift shop, where I bought a wildcat poster and a small lump of semi-precious rock that I locked in my Keyper, Sheldon, and cherished as if it were a diamond.)

As an adult, I once attended the Bookseller’s Retail Awards at the Museum and I bet there wasn’t a person in that room who didn’t spend a rapturous moment gazing up at Dippy, then installed in the main hall, feeling through a couple of glasses of fizz the same fascination he inspired in us as kids. (Perhaps, let’s face it, feeling it even more strongly… hic!…)

In December 2020 I made my only trip to London in eighteen months to drift through the halls again, seeking inspiration for an anthology of poems inspired by the Museum’s collections. It was a bright, cold day. I walked from Victoria Station through eerily empty streets and, without the usual gaggles of school children, found I had the Museum almost to myself.

Pacing the echoing galleries, stopping to investigate everything that intrigued me, was both wonderful and sad. I should have been jostled by excitable children speculating about dinosaur poo and meteorites, examining creepy crawlies with gleeful disgust, feigning nonchalance in the face of the roaring T-Rex and excitedly planning their gift shop spree. It was a stark reminder of how much the past year and a half has stolen from us all. In some small way, I hoped the anthology could bring a little of that wonder to readers at home, without anyone having to be sick into a carrier bag on a coach.

The Museum’s mission is to inspire passionate advocates for the planet, who will campaign to protect our fragile natural environment. So many of their exhibits show us new perspectives on the world, from the bizarre creatures in the deepest seas (I’m particularly taken with Archie, the female giant squid) to the stars on the furthest edge of the galaxy (wait: do galaxies have edges? There’s so much I still need to find out...) Something I love about reading, and particularly reading poetry, is that it can transport us in a few lines into another place, time and even consciousness, so I looked for poems that helped me imagine lumbering with elephants, darting with otters or soaring with an owl on the night air.

We’ve never needed people committed to protecting the natural world more, especially in the next generation. But children play outside less and less frequently. The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane – from which I have included poems in Wonder – was written in response to the names of natural things being dropped from a children’s dictionary: modern kids had, apparently, no need to speak of kingfishers or conkers, bluebells or ivy. There’s no substitute for experiencing the natural world but perhaps, for the days when we are running from pillar to post as our lives begin to regain their frenzied pre-pandemic shapes, a poem can transport us to the rainforest, the Milky Way or inside the beehive and help kindle that wonder that will see us fight to save them.

The children are back at school, and I’m preparing to return to the office as I write. I feel anxious: is it responsible? Can I spend a day in a waist that isn’t elasticated? Will I be able to socialise in any convincing way with three dimensional humans? I hope, as we all do, that we’re emerging from our long wintering now, though I feel nervous about the winter to come. And I hope the Museum is ringing with the shrieks and gasps of children meeting the blue whale model for the first time, pinching their companions like the tentacle of a Colossal squid or thinking about cuddling Guy the Gorilla.

Wonder is available now from all the usual places including your local bookshop, Bookshop.org, Waterstones or signed copies from the Haslemere Bookshop.

Talking and Writing

I’m always up for talking about books and poetry or book publicity, whether it’s for school groups, libraries, bookshops, festivals or corporate events. There’s more information on the Events page of my website.

I’m preparing an interactive event for Primary Schools around Wonder and poems about the natural world, and I have a talk for Secondary Schools on the hidden history of women’s writing, so do get in touch if these might be of interest.

I can also talk to your writing group and give an insider’s view of book publicity, thanks to my other job as a book publicist – find details here.

I wrote a blog post for the Children’s Poetry Summit this month about how poetry can help children use their imaginations to identify with the natural world.

Recommended reading

Featured poems

I love this poem by Emily Dickinson, from the Space section of Wonder.

And I have a second poem to share this time: I was thrilled to be one of the judges for the Trip Fiction Voyages by Verse poetry competition. The winning poem was this beautiful entry by Rebecca Stonehill, ‘Tripoli Dreaming’. You can hear Rebecca reading it here and visit her website here.

New on the blog

Other stuff I’ve enjoyed this month

• I am belatedly catching up with the adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere, based on Celeste Ng’s book (which I haven’t read, so I don’t know what’s going to happen) and am completely hooked.

• I’m re-reading Claire Vaye Watkins mercurial forthcoming novel I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness in preparation for working on it. It’s full of fireworks, touching on motherhood, legacy, madness, the Mojave desert and the Manson Family.

• Somehow I had missed series 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m catching up now (it’s available on More 4 and Amazon Prime at the moment). I can’t watch more than one episode every few days, and I spend each one crying tears of fury and despair (and just occasionally punching the air) but my god it is so incredibly good.

• A book my colleagues and I have been working on for a while, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs, came out this week and has been brilliantly received. It’s been a labour of love for us all and I’m so thrilled to watch it fly off shelves!

• We went no further than beautiful Dorset (Hardy country!) this summer but I am vicariously enjoying Richard E Grant’s literary travels in Write Around the World.

• I’m listening to Philippa Perry’s interesting The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and trying to put some of her advice into practice. With mixed success, if I’m honest, having spent four hours yesterday acknowledging my five year old’s emotions as she scrolled through a noisy carousel of her greatest hits including ‘at some point the computer has to get turned off’ and ‘none of my teeth are wobbly’. A work in progress.

• I loved Gita Ralleigh’s poetry collection A Terrible Thing, which is full of powerful hymns to girls, goddesses, mothers and wise women.

• I had a little cry at this lovely poem co-written by poet Laura Mucha and paediatricians around the UK last year. NHS staff are still working unbelievably hard after a relentless year and deserve our enduring thanks and admiration.

• I’m devouring the new Netflix series The Chair, in which Sandra Oh plays the new head of a failing English department in a prestigious university. (Book adjacent, right!?)

Thanks for reading! Any feedback would be gratefully received, and if you enjoyed this newsletter please don’t hesitate to share with likeminded readers.