Simon Zonenblick - Writing and more

  My pamphlet Dove, Deferred , featuring 23 poems written between 2008 and 2020, was printed on 3rd  November, and is the first title in my burgeoning small press project The Z Press.   Concerning wildlife, childhood memories, and loss, Dove, Deferred also contains the first poems I wrote after the death of my father in 2018.  These poems of moonlight, stars, "unravelling skies" and winter sun inhabit liminal landscapes, the "frozen folklore" of caves, "the bridges, bends and viaducts" of railways, the elusive trails of wild animals, and the moors and valleys of my home county of Yorkshire.  Some of the poems have been published in Allegro Poetry, and In Posse Review. Dove, Deferred is available directly from myself (email caterpillarpoetry@gmail.com) and will soon be available to loan from various library services, and if possible at various book shops.  You can hear some excerpts from the pamphlet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXTjbE8I...

I have often lived and walked in areas profuse in Betula pendula - silver birch trees - and my current Calder Valley stamping grounds are no exception.  This summer, for obvious reasons, most of my rambles have been within a few surrounding miles of home, and I've been getting to know certain birch-rich woodland patches on my own doorstep more closely. I've also, by virtue of working form home, been spending a lot more time than usual directly by my front window, which overlooks the canal at Sowerby Bridge, and its varied gallery of trees.  I found myself recently drawn to the copse of silver birches that form part of this woody fringe, and writing about them.  Before sharing the poetry this prompted, I'd like to begin with an older piece, written in 2008 and inspired by my walks through the woodlands on the edge of Roundhay Park in Leeds.  February Birches was later published in my 2014 pamphlet Random Journeys. To say I feel at home among these trees, almost ever-p...

Following a blazing spring, summer began with downpours, and is only now brightening. But even on this sunny afternoon, the clouds are sky-wide, like sodden blotting paper.  Its rained pretty much constantly through June, the Calder Valley landscape is drenched in vivid green. I don't think I've ever seen so many leaves on the trees.  These cumulous skies have put me in mind of cloud-themed poetry, of which I have written an abundance through the years.  Two of my unpublished collections contain homages to clouds, and my still-being-written pamphlet of purposely verbose poems Slitheroe Bridge includes a special sequence of short poems about them:  Clouds, like bones of undiscovered animals dotting desert sands or the silty silences of caves, stud night's mirage of starlit dark, skeletons dredged from a broken arc. My poem Cloud depicts a spring sky, a bubble of clotted cream, spilt into a pool of splashed shiraz , in which one individual cloud, fat, ...

Random Journeys , a gathering of twenty one poems written between 2001 and 2014, was published in April 2014 by The Unpretentious Arts, Ripponden. The pamphlet contains poems previously published in Poetry Now, Tears in the Fence, The Black Rose, and also online via both InPossee Review and The Maynard. All for sale copies are now out of stock pending a reprint, but some are still available through libraries. These poems , begins the blurb, offer reflections on the natural world, rooted in the poet's native Yorkshire.   Indeed, most of the poems concern wildlife sightings in and around the edges of West Yorkshire, drawn from childhood memory and contemporary observation, even though they are fairly general in terms of their descriptions - the song thrush summer-plumped and freckle-flecked , might just as easily occupy a tree in London, Lancashire or Llandudno, though set together the poems conjure for me now a tangible memory of the decade or so that I lived in the almost-ru...

A few copies of my 2013 pamphlet Freezings - containing edited versions of stories written between 2004-06 - are available from myself, and through Calderdale Libraries. In the fullness of time I will make them available elsewhere. Described by Ian Brinton in international literary journal Tears in the Fence as dystopian landscapes bleakly transposed , the five stories all take concern solitary introspection, nocturnal encounters, or surreal imaginings, as when a man's tears bring forth the growth of fruit in a dream-like desert land, with violent consequences. The opening piece, which takes its title from a line in a Shakespeare sonnet quoted forlornly by one of its care-worn characters (the pamphlet's title, in turn, taken from this line), begins: A desolate expanse of disused warehouses and factories dribbled into the distance beyond the platform, the night air pinpricked by a few dim lights in the windows of peripheral blocks of flats. This melancholy commencem...

In the autumn of 2013, I put together a suite of six poems, mostly composed in the spring of 2004 under the influence of Keats, various translations of Ancient Chinese poetry, and my pedestrian readings of dream interpretations. The resulting sequence was never intended to be a serious exploration of dreams or the psychology or popular pseudo-science attached to them, but more a somewhat fun dip into those waters with some fancy imagery and open-ended fragments. The heart's hidden theme, the buried beam, the conscious mind's illogical extreme, the spectral stream, the brain's coal seam, the splintered scream, the hushed-up scheme, the mutilated meme, the dream. Dreams are variously imagined as starlit carnivals of drowsy delights , and submerged motifs of the subconscious , and there is even a nod to those unremembered dreams now absorbing dust on cutting room floors.   The poems are mainly light hearted - in one I ponder the question Is a drea...

Apropos of my previous post about my collection Little Creatures, the following is a list of online items containing quotes from the book or other items about it: YouTube promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aUI-mxKHBw Three Collections of Poetry video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cU35i5eh_g Excerpts from my Nov 2017 Little Creatures reading at Pencilvania, Fox and Goose, Hebden Bridge: Damselfly Octolune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dro_JxHuk Snail's Lament, by Albert Kalimbikatha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hraeu6T9eIk Slug Sex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTplLs5u6U8 Slug Octolune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebqzz59jXLo From Season of the Rains, by Simon Mpondo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H10eSlsqA4U From my Millipede sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj2GrhwvKYI Adam Zagajewski's Moths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i...