Simon Zonenblick - Writing and more

  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...

  This was my final column of 2021 for the Halifax Courier, part of my "Wildlife Watch" series which appears in the paper roughly every fortnight. I'm looking from my window onto the Rochdale Canal, watching a mallard float amid the ripples. It reminds me how these columns began with my walks from here in Sowerby Bridge along that same canal, taking in the birds, buds, and the coming of spring. The clouds and puddles this December morning are a far cry from the the warm colours of those April days. Paths are streaked in residue of rain, car bonnets veneered in frost. The canal, whose sun-sparkled surface glittered below flowering trees, shivers now, beneath skeletal branches and doomy skies. But recent snows, together with festive birds and berries, remind us that winter heralds beauties of its own. Every day I watch goosanders dot the cold canal, males with heads of polished green, females eagle-eyed with snow-white breasts and ginger tufts. Though year-round residents, ...

Like much of the world, I spent a large part of yesterday reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks in the USA, and how the world was never, and never can be, the same again following that tragedy. The following poem was written some years after, and although it has appeared on various online platforms over the years, I have subsequently edited the poem, and this is its first appearance in its definitive form. It describes my walk home from work that afternoon, oblivious to what was going on and wrapped up in my own thoughts. News travelled more slowly in those days. SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001  After an early shift  I pass the hairdressers,  the paper shop,  semi’s, Vauxhalls,  hanging-basket-driveways.  To save time, I cut along the Ring Road  down an avenue of bungalows  and bounteous gardens  bright with fuchsias, roses and chrysanthemums.  Its quiet, but then again, its Tuesday afternoon.  Sunlight is c...

Owing to the imminence of a forthcoming poetry publication on the theme, invertebrates have been on my mind. On a canalside walk with friends, we noted that this year there seemed to have been more insects than ever around these parts. Perhaps it’s a combination of thriving trees and plants planted in recent years, and the recent hot weather – which increases insect mating - but I have noticed a boon of little creatures on the leaves and branches flanking the canal, weaving in and out of riverside flowers, and turning up unexpectedly on roadsides, in fields and woods. Naturally, there is no shortage of seasonal regulars – wasps seem to outnumber bees, though the hollyhocks on my road are a favourite haunt of honeybees, which gorge on pollen and emerge smothered in white, like dusted jellybabies. Roadisde roses and thistles by the Calder throng with bees, wasps and ants. White and peacock butterflies bob about the flowers at Copley reserve, where I watched a cinnamon moth caterpilla...

What would have been my mother's 80th birthday seems a good time to acknowledge the degree to which my own interest in wildlife and nature writing is owed directly to her influence. Not only was my mum someone who encouraged a respect for the natural world in daily life, she was also able to do so through her work in nurseries and with younger school children, not least through the production of some factual descriptions of British wildlife for child readers. It is no mawkish exagerration to say that I learned more from these lovingly crafted educational provisions than from many "official" nature books. One of my childhood memories is of my mother supporting a "Save the Whales" campaign in the 1980's, and it was therefore a somewhat bittersweet irony that I was reading a book about whales at the time of her death. The work of Sally Carrighar and other naturalists such as JA Baker, Rachel Carson, Nan Shephard, Valmik Thapar and Ann Zwinger, has directly ...