Simon Zonenblick - Writing and more

I am delighted to announce my exhibition of 23 full colour images of Hollingworth Lake, on display now at Smithy Bridge Library, Rochdale.   All photos are for sale at £10 each, and some will also feature in my forthcoming Hollingworth Lake 2024 calendars and greeting cards, which will also be available from the library and elsewhere.

 I am delighted to announce the return of my Wildlife Watch nature column to the Halifax Courier, for a new monthly series that will run for approximately one year. The first installment of my new essays appeared this month, featuring the recent snowfall in the valley. I have added below my reading of the full transcript of the piece.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tsrbJ01sWk

I've written what would appear to be my first poem of 2023, though the bird it celebrates was seen some years ago, and the photo was taken in summer so may seem inappropriate for the scenery described (though anyone who knows the Calder Valley knows what our summers can be like!) Yellowhammer Lemon-sherbet-yellow breast, you flash grey rocks in spritzy glimmerings of vigour: creamy chrome, a lucid sun, buffy blush of banana coloured beauty, your icing sugar tint is topped by peppery flecks of black and white, your golden face ball-bearing-eyed, your fluttery shape so rare a sight in this wet and windy place as to feel a sort of postcard from the Tropics.

Following the historic launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 space programme, in which the space agency sent the Orion craft into lunar orbit in preparation for sending astronauts to the moon for the first time in half a century, I find myself embracing more and more the beautiful, liminally hypnotic Artemis, from US singer songwriter Gail Warning’s album Season of the Soul (2008).  Artemis has been a firm favourite since I first heard the song more than a decade ago, and this lyrical lunar love letter owes as much to moon mythology as it does to the phenomenon of space exploration. “Artemis, daughter of the wilderness,” sings Gail with tender melancholy, “your moonlit vision, cuts through the night…” and indeed, this enchanting album, listened to by moonlight or looking out into the night, does feel like a sort of nocturnal voyage of discovery. Identified by the Romans with Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, the mythical Artemis was the sister of Apollo, and in Roman mythology gradually

I am delighted to announce my new #photography venture, where I will be producing & selling greeting cards & calendars, the first of which will feature local celebrities The Sowerby Bridge Geese - see my Insta page for more  https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjfer45L_A7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

  I will be taking my recently published debut poetry collection, An Invertebrate Fable, on a readings tour, with dates and venues to be added in due course.   The inaugural instalment will be at the lovely Time for Tea, Bury New Rd, Prestwich, for the Prestwich Arts Festival, this coming Sunday 25th Sept at 1pm.  Full details in link below, but you can expect many excerpts from the book, along with my readings of poems and prose by other authors on an insect/invertebrate theme. https://www.prestwichartsfestival.co.uk/events-1/my-invertebrate-afternoon-poetry-reading