White Mink

The first helping of "the icing on the cake", the regional book launches which form an essential part of Durham's Literary Festival, celebrated the publication of A Kind of Mink and white lies are harmless, the two latest additions to Diamond Twig's acclaimed Branchlines poetry series. The evening was hosted by Diamond Twig's Ellen Phethean, who explained the imprint's policy: Diamond Twig publishes first collections by women poets. She and her publishing partner, Julia Darling, had followed the progress of Jeanne Macdonald and Heather Young through their studies on the University of Newcastle on Tyne's MA in Writing Poetry, and she emphasised how hard they had worked to develop their craft. Now they had "blossomed like flowers into the kind of gems we like to see growing on our diamond twigs!"

First to read was Jeanne Macdonald. She is not only a poet herself, but also the co-ordinator of the Blinking Eye poetry competition, the only UK poetry competition exclusively for writers over the age of 50, which was on the verge of declaring its first winner. It was hardly surprising, then, that she agreed with Ellen Phethean that writing grows from experience, but she added that poetry is also - hence the title of her book - made of white lies. Reading from her poem I Love a Lassie:

Father buckles the straps on my kilt,
and fastens the leather buttons
on my green wool jacket...

she commented that this was her earliest memory of her father; the poem's claim that it was her fifth birthday was just one of the collection's "white lies"!

Jeanne also read her poem Dressed, which has been included in the Poetry Society's Anthology for National Poetry Day: the theme this year is "Food", and no-one who has read Dressed will ever feel the same way about crab again.

If there were any white lies in Heather Young's poetry, she wasn't letting on. Starting with a vivid evocation of her first day at school:

Miss Brown was as big as a blacklock, rounder
than a slug; brown twinset oozing mothballs
behind Class 1 Register.

"I didn't like her", she explained, as if the poem didn't make this perfectly clear. The poems that followed were like an album of photographs of the different moments of life, from childhood in Annfield Place, to her pride in her baby daughter snug in the womb of her "New Pram", and on to the more recent past of holidays in Thailand and last year's luxuriously, impractically pale new carpet:

                 ...Cream, he says, 
it's not quite as light as cream, more
fawn, or warm beige,
too pale for mushroom, more a kind of mink.

The experiences of her life were the material of her poetry, but the resultant poems were not simply reminiscences of the past; in Ellen Phethean's words, this was "ongoing, living poetry".

The two new "Twiglets" were supported by two poets published by Mudfog Press. Katharine Banner has lived and worked on a dairy farm in North Yorkshire since 1985. This side of her life is reflected in her poem Accidents, recorded by the BBC for World Poetry Day in 2001, during the Foot and Mouth epidemic. But it also finds room for the view from a hotel window in Las Vegas, where, she said, she had kept herself sane by reading Hunter S. Thomson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The final poem in her first collection, [Aerial Photography], published last year by Mudfog, grew from a conversation at a party with a man whose job was shredding books - including poetry books - to provide the pulp padding for Jiffy bags:

Take this as you will:
hope for us all;
no hope for any of us, at all.

Marion Husband's recent Mudfog pamphlet Service, has a single theme, her late father, a butcher and fish-and-chip shop owner whose stories of his wartime service fascinated his children. Her poems show fragments of the life of this "ordinary soldier" whose stories enthralled his children. Her poems are absolutely specific, but their simplicity and emotional truth invited the audience to fit their own memories to hers.

This event was held in association with Independent Northern Publishers.

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Last update: 11th October 2004