The Well at Winter Solstice
- Submitting institution
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Liverpool Hope University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- ER33C
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Salt Publishing
- ISBN
- 9781784631840
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The underpinning research for the poems in The Well at Winter Solstice is the philosophy of new-materialism and posthuman thought and experiential in-situ writing practice.
At From Cosmos to Genes: New Materialist Methodologies Crossing the Humanities, Natural, and Technosciences (EU funded selected summer school), Charles University Prague, 2016, I was introduced to the philosophy of Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, whose ideas inform this collection.
My research into Welsh poetry and history also inform the collection as does the local and folkloric history of Liverpool. I write with specific environments to enact a process of transformation. First drafts are improvisations responding to what is heard in silence. I edit these drafts informed by my literary knowledge of poetic technique to create a voice which can further communicate what has been known. Holy wells at St James’s Gardens, Liverpool and at Penmon, Anglesey, act as focal points for this dialogue as the poems articulate a post-anthropocentric poetics which understands the human subject as an entanglement of myriad energetic forces felt across time and space. For example, ‘Bridie’s Tomb’ was written in-situ in St James Gardens in August 2016. The poem is a conversation with a ghost. It was written a month after the Brexit vote and in a Victorian cholera graveyard. The poem warns of a dangerous future still to come.
The manuscript received a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry in 2018. The title poem, ‘The Well at Winter Solstice’, has been translated and published in French and German (Versopolis, 2019); six poem-songs have been created by leading folk musicians Emily Portman and Mikey Kenney and performed in resonant architectural settings on summer and winter solstice 2019/20. The book has received a substantial review in Poetry Wales. I read at Stanza International Poetry Festival, St Andrews, amongst other readings in 2019/20.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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