Output details
29 - English Language and Literature
Birmingham City University
The Lewknor Turn
This collection is made up of poems written by Mellors between 2009 and 2012. An earlier version of the sequence ‘The Gordon Brown Sonnets’ was published as a Verisimilitude chapbook in 2009 with paintings by David Rees, and poems from ‘bent out of shape’ started life as a collaboration with multimedia artist Penny Hallas, which also generated an installation for the 2013 Orpheus / Eurydice Day in Powys: http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/2586/glasfryn-orpheuseurydice-day/. The sequence as a whole connects with research based on a field trip to the Mani area of southern Greece (see Output 1) and follows on from work in this area by poets Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Riley, and Peter Hughes. ‘Homage to Rod McKuen’ was written for, and performed at, the Hay Poetry Jamboree 2012. Versions of some poems in the collection have appeared in online and print magazines such as ‘Great Works’, ‘Poetry Wales’, and ‘Angel Exhaust’, and many of them have been read at Hay, the Swedenborg Hall reading series in Bloomsbury, and at London venues such as Crossing the Line and The Blue Bus. Robert Sheppard cites ‘The Gordon Brown Sonnets’ in his lecture on ‘The Innovative Sonnet Sequence’ (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/07/on-the-innovative-sonnet/), and poet Allen Fisher broadcast his reading of one of the sonnets at the Cambridge University event ‘unAmerican Activities across the Atlantic’ on November 17 2013 (available at http://www.archiveofthenow.org/).