the willow in the wind beyond the hedge

Hello, and welcome to this week’s newsletter,
This week's newsletter is a very personal one for me as I have been thinking a great deal about missing friends.

Next week is the funeral of my lovely friend Meg Cox, so she is very much in my mind. Meg came to poetry later in life, and then embraced it, and the friendships that came with it, wholeheartedly. She was funny, irreverent, wise, sometimes gloriously naughty, and wonderful company. Her collection A Square of Sunlight is all of those things too: a book full of a long life actually lived, of love and loss, dogs, unsuitable men, memories, laughter and the determination to notice what is still good.

Meg launched A Square of Sunlight with us at the Poetry Pharmacy in Bishop's Castle in 2022. I find myself returning to it now, hearing her voice in those poems and being reminded of one of the peculiar gifts of poetry: that the people we love can go on talking to us from the page.

And that has felt especially true because another much-loved friend has unexpectedly returned to us in poems.

Kathryn Bevis was a dear friend of mine and of Poetry Pharmacist poet Pat Edwards, and friend to so many others in our close-knit poetry community here in the UK. Just a few weeks before she died in May 2024, Kathryn launched her first full collection, The Butterfly House, with us at the Poetry Pharmacy. She was very ill by then, but she was so bloody determined to make it. And she did. It was to be the last celebration of her extraordinary writing life, surrounded by friends, celebrating the book she had worked so hard to bring into the world.

After Kathryn died, her partner Oliver Golding found around forty unpublished poems on her laptop. With the love and support of her family and friends, ten of those poems have now become Wild Devotion, a beautiful short collection published posthumously by Di Slaney at Candlestick Press.

There is something almost miraculous about receiving new words from someone you never expected to hear from again.

So this month's newsletter is for the friends we miss. And for the strange mixture of sadness and gratitude that comes with having loved someone and lost them.

Two very different, very loved poets. Two friends we wish were still here and two books that remind us that, in poetry at least, a voice doesn't entirely disappear.

You can listen to Kathryn reading her poem My Cancer as a Ring-Tailed Lemur here. It's lovely to hear her voice and witness a little of her extraordinary grace in the face of her diagnosis. 

And here's a poem from Meg from A Square of Sunlight
Sometimes It’s a Quiet Poem

like the sweep
of the willow in the wind
beyond the hedge

or the movement
of the tail of my dog
when I smile

it could be
a petal falling from the jug
of yellow tulips

or the snow
on the window after dark
rain on a pond

the ember
that falls in the log burner
behind the glass

it might be
the last sight of him at the corner
when he didn’t look back

or a cloud covering the sun.  


Take a look at our curated bookshelf with reading for when someone you love is no longer there, but somehow still everywhere. Poems and other writing about friendship, absence, memory, grief and the strange ways we continue our conversations with the people we miss.



Further reading: the grief of losing a friend

We talk a great deal about the grief of losing parents, partners and family, but perhaps less about what happens when a close friend dies. Friendship has no official place in the usual hierarchy of bereavement, despite the fact that our closest friends may have accompanied us through decades of our lives.

This thoughtful piece in Psychology Today explores what researchers call “disenfranchised grief”: grief that is deeply felt but not always fully recognised by the world around us. It also looks at research into just how significant and long-lasting the effects of losing a close friend can be.

Read: The Profound Significance of a Close Friend’s Death →

Events
Click the links to take you directly to events in 
York, Bishop's Castle, Oxford Street and Online

Join poet Chrys Salt and musician Richard Ingham for an evening exploring the richness and complexity of North East India

Rooted in Chrys Salt’s highly regarded collection The Punkawallah’s Rope and born of her performance at the Kolkata Book Fair and an immersive month in Kolkata and North East India, The Punkawallah’s Rope explores the vibrant textures, voices, and contradictions of a continent both dazzling and daunting.

Through layered poems and haunting instrumentals played on various Indian instruments - the aludu, the bansuri, gopi yantra by International musician and saxophonist Richard Ingham the performance poses the question:

How can a middle-class white woman begin to understand and engage with this most complex and challenging of continents?

Book of the Month 

Eating Air
Suyin Du Bois
 

Our August Book of the Month is Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois. This remarkable debut pamphlet is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging, and connection. Travelling across cuisines, continents, and generations, Du Bois explores her Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, revealing how the meals we make, share, and remember become inseparable from our identities. Rich with sensory detail and emotional insight, Eating Air reminds us that every dish carries a story, and that food can be a vessel for love, memory, and home.

You can get a free drink in our London and Bishops Castle bookshops when you pick up a copy of our book of the month!