Simon Zonenblick - Writing and more

 I have been writing prolifically of late, both for imminent publication, and much more aimlessly. It is often hard to know what to do with the vast amount of writing I've produced, so from time to time I have decided to share a little more of it here. Much of my recent scribbling has been done in the course of railway journeys, and I reproduce the following short poetry sequence as a tiny taste of the times. Dreamed up on returning from a trip to the coast, it is an example of the sort of material I have been writing almost therapeutically, in between more laboured efforts at structured work.   TRAIN TRIP TRIPTYCH   The Estuary, Humber’s tongue, licks land, expands into a sea-like bulge of bluey grey     The Humber at night is a vast flat mat of blue-black glass, sleek sheet of slate, ice-slice, brightened by stripes of lemon light as headlights drip electric onto water   On the late train, riding by the towns and fiel...

2026 has been an immensely busy year thus far, with a tremendous amount of time taken up travelling to and from places I have been writing about for ongoing and future projects.  South and East Yorkshire, Cumbria, and central England, not to mention my native stamping grounds in West Yorkshire, have  featured frequently, and in just a few hours' time I will be bouncing off to Brum for the umpteenth time.  Much news will be forthcoming in regard to all. I was delighted to be published for the second time in The Dalesman magazine in February, with an article profiling William Dutton, the innovative founder, artistic director and conductor of Cuore, Yorkshire's newest chamber orchestra, who I interviewed amid the illustrious confines of Harrogate's Royal Hall, the orchestra's main performing home.  Having attended Cuore's inaugural concert last May, it was a privilege to be able to help spread the word, and I am thrilled to say that the article has already secured fur...

I am delighted to announce the publication of my book Borderlands: Exploring The Yorkshire/Lancashire Boundary.    BORDERLANDS: EXPLORING THE YORKSHIRE/LANCASHIRE BOUNDARY By Simon Zonenblick The book, describing my journeys and encounters in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of county boundary changes, is priced at £14.50 for physical copies, or £6.50 for ebook/Word doc version.   It contains full colour photographs and many interviews and quotes. I will be selling copies at Sowerby Bridge's Foundry St Community Centre on 14th Dec, and at a special reading at Todmorden Library, 15th Dec, both 2pm, both free entry. Back cover: BORDERLANDS: EXPLORING THE YORKSHIRE / LANCASHIRE BOUNDARY By Simon Zonenblick   When Yorkshire born poet and nature writer Simon Zonenblick moved to Sowerby Bridge in 2012, he found himself not only exploring the dramatic countryside of the Calder Valley, but also, bit by bit, edging across the border into Lancashire, where he enjo...

 I was delighted to launch my nature diary The Wind Blows Thick Upon The Moor, recorded between September 2022-September 2023, at King Cross Library, Halifax, last month, along with the book's illustrator, Calderdale based artist Emily Howarth (pictured credit Helena Zhura) . The book is available to purchase from me directly at £12.50, or as a Word doc / PDF at £4.50. It will shortly be available to loan from Calderdale Libraries. I will be selling copies of this book, along with many others, at Sowerby Bridge Community Centre's Christmas Fayre, on 14th Dec 2025, 12-4pm.                                                                                                        

Working through some unpublished bird poems for future collections, I have chosen to share the following trio as they are quite apt for the time of year, and I happen to have a photograph appropriate for each. I hope you like them! BULLFINCH With a belly like a bottle of port this birch-basking,  blood-bibbed bird, nut-sucking connoiseur, struts poshly over hedges, plumply patrols herb gardens like a portly Justice-of-the-Peace. LONG TAILED TITS, EARLY MORNING AT THE STATION Notes of mousy music, you bounce the branches of deciduous staves, flip and float, trapezing trees in haphazard dances –   flighty types, brown clowns, impetuous imps, you jump and trick, skip twigs so quick, bob and hop and polka-dot the dawn. DUNNOCK Dusky dove, your pebbly breast a mist-bruised, ash, star-pimpled sky, you tilt a beak, as if fly-catching, slide-fly into a tunnel of tree, and merge into its woody kiss.

By nine or ten, the tensions seem to have eased, and the city seems lulled by a wave of collective relief, now that the voting is over, and the die is cast. There is a pervading sense of calm. Hopefully not the calm before the storm. I see and hear equal levels of support for either candidate, and these cut across all demographics. At Rockerfeller Plaza, the crowds and couples saunter in middle aged ease, well dressed and chipper, like the audience of a classical concert. On Broadway, families mingle. Without wishing to sound unduly mawkish or naive, even at Time Square there are both pro and anti Trump supporters talking civilly.  Someone in a huge bear costume - one half blue Democrat, the other Republican red - is offering "Hugs for Unity," which are keenly taken up.  There is a general sense that Harris is winning - though my optimism is cautious: this, after all, is not Florida or Alaska. This is New York. At Herald Square subway station, an elderly black man sings the s...

St Patrick's Cathedral offers a haven of peace amid the tension, but I'm soon out on the street again, edging my way through the throng towards Wall Street. Most New Yorkers are just going about their business at this early evening hour, though crowds are swelling in Time Square. As darkness falls, the Rockerfeller Centre is illuminated in flourescent red, white and blue.  People of every nationality, not to mention multitudinous Americans, are making it a carnival atmosphere. Skaters swerve to the sounds of Prince and Janet Jackson. The festive spirit is in marked contrast to what is happening a few blocks down. The anti-Israel march is swallowing up all in its path. Some of the posters and slogans are deeply antisemitic. Hard to say how far it relates to the election, as of course they hate both candidates equally. A man in a Captain America costume hogs the crossing, standing in the middle of the road and declaring through his microphone that "Donald J Trump" is ab...

  I wasn’t expecting to like DC. The best I’d imagined was that it would be dull – I’d been told to expect a rather uneventful city without a buzz, inhabited almost entirely by state administrators – while the worst was that in the late days of the most turbulent Presidential election of modern times, the atmosphere would be somewhat, well … turbulent.  I could not have been more wrong.    Washington DC is a splendid city.   Its people are friendly and unthreatening, its transport system is simple, clean and inexpensive. I love its tree lined avenues, dripping in autumnal colour, and reminding me of the suburbs of my own home town. I love its tall 19 th Century terraces, its quiet wine bars and its restaurants – all of which look well above my price range but add an ambience to the city streets at night that makes it feel gently hip and relaxed. I love the historic monuments, the magnificent museums, and the cleanliness of the sidewalks, the languid bends of it...

  My first sight of the Capitol Building – which I take at first glance for the White House - comes through the glass wall of a corridor at Ronald Reagan airport, a far-off conical dome which at this angle looks slightly tilted, like an elaborate teapot sculpted out of chalk.  It is stunningly beautiful. Built by a variety of architects over a period of around three decades, it is a triumph of the Neo-classical, in its way as iconic as the Presidential home its self. Its presence as an emblem of Democracy has taken on a new poignancy since January the 6th, 2021, whose shameful events require no retelling here. I watched the previous US Presidential election from my kitchen in Calderdale, England. I will watch this one in the United States its self - and while my visit to the country was prompted by a variety of personal motivations, prominent among them was the desire to undertake it at this moment in its history - "an immensely consequential moment", as the veteran US politi...

Sunset in Downtown Detroit. Traffic lights blur into soft dots of red. Wind wraps its self around the spire of the Methodist church, all but whistles down Michigan Avenue. The stocky office blocks and chunky, muscular buildings of the USA's North East were built to last in a climate of bitter winds and cruel cold. Almost as soon as I arrived in Detroit, even though the sun was shining, I felt the pelt of hailstones. And yet, refreshing after the sweltering heatwave of California, I like this weather. It is bracing. It gets me moving. It reminds me of home. Hands stuffed into pockets, I push down Shelby Street, shuffle down the sidewalks with no particular destination. The wind picks up. On Washington Boulevard, the street lights melt into a twilight turning purple. The Ford Building rises like a column of snow. I cross a tasteful square, pass a bunch of old men sitting on a bench playing jolly music. A huge block of apartments stands above us, and from half way up a young man gaz...

  I am coming towards the end of a three week visit to the United States, my first trip to the country at what is surely by any metric a most significant juncture in its history. These travels take me from New York to Washington DC and back, encompassing a range of other cities in between, and have prompted a large amount of writing and photography, providing me with material for a multitude of projects, far exceeding the one or two ideas I had on setting out.  These include a celebration of my Stateside nature sightings, my thoughts on American railway ("railroad"?) travel, a development of my Night Stations book idea, and a diary of the final week of the Presidential Election and how it seemed to me.   I envisage incorporating these writings into a future book of travel essays, and would like to share a few brief excerpts from them here. With a nod to the late, great British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke and his legendary radio programme Letter From America (...

 I am thrilled to announce the forthcoming publication of my debut book of nature essays, A Year in the Calder Valley, due from Saraband next month.  The collection features pieces first published in the Halifax Courier and Sowerby Bridge's Go Local magazine, as well as many previously unpublished articles.  Full details can be found via the Saraband website: A Year in the Calder Valley - Saraband

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 gradu...

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

 

I am delighted to announce my debut full-length poetry collection, An Invertebrate Fable - Ten Sequences of Poetry about Insects, Gastropods and Arthropods , with natural history publisher Brambleby Books, Devon.    These poems celebrate invertebrate life with the help of beautiful full colour images by many talented photographers, and are arranged into ten creature-based suites. The book includes a glossary, and a foreword by Peter Smithers, Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. It is available now from the Brambleby Books website (link below), and soon from various book shops. Some of the poems have quite long histories, but most were written between 2019-22.  A lot has happened since the book was first submitted as a publication idea just over three years ago!  Its publication is a testament to the tenacity, dedication and hard work of Nicola and Hugh Loxdale of Brambleby Books. I very much hope to take Invertebrate "on the road" this year, with readings at v...