Tag Archives: International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Departure – on its way?

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International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 3 March 2020

Friday 16 September is an exciting day: the catalogue of David Duggleby, Valuers & Auctioneers, includes 24 works by the artist Graham Kingsley Brown. He was the father of my friend Sophie Brown. She is my webmaster, designed the original website for my psychotherapy practice and, in 2016, this website.

Sophie is herself a Fine Arts graduate and practising artist. That is how I got talking to her about a suitable design for the cover of my second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous. It was wonderful to have the actual painting at the launch. Strange to think that a fortnight later I had my own departure – fled just before the UK lockdown to my bolthole in Holland.


The Departure is Lot 203, the estimate £400 – £600, and the approx. sale time is 13:54 – 14:14 UK time. The auction is at the venue in in Scarborough and live online, so – if you are drawn to any of the works, register and make a bid!

Details of all the works can be found here in the catalogue:

On her blog Sophie has previously written about her interpretation of The Departure – it may be inspired, partly, by his childhood experience of being evacuated during WW2.

Ferry crossing – poem

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Fokkina_McDonnell_Poetry_Launch_3March2020_with_GKB_Painting (002)

The Departure, book and me (Photo: copyright Sophie J Brown)

 
Here I am with my second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous at the launch, held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester on the 3rd of March. It was a wonderful occasion, made very special by Graham Kingsley Brown’s painting The Departure being there too.

His daughter Sophie Brown (herself a talented artist) designed this website. Visit www.grahamkingsleybrown.com and click on the Curator’s Diary for her account of the launch and to read what the meaning of the painting may be (entry 28 November 2019).

Below is the first poem of the book. This may well be the ferry from Harwich, UK to Hook of Holland, the Netherlands. A ferry crossing is a departure of a kind …

 

Ferry crossing

Two people sit at a table by an oblong picture window.
Sun lights up their hands which are curled round coffee cups.

The window is made of safety glass. There have been announcements:
location of lifebelts, life rafts, long and short blast of a horn.

While words are hidden at the obscure side of imagination,
other people are queuing for lunch or buying alcohol in the shop.

The folded hands are the back of playing cards, The Queen of Spades,                                    operas, novellas, the shortest of short stories.

It is not strange to see these cards turn into sea gulls.
A white ferry is a city where nothing is permanent.

Why are we in Vietnam?

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9781912876228
Tomorrow is the publication date of my second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous. The book is already on Amazon and has been available for pre-publication orders from Indigo Dreams Publishing.

The publishers have selected six accessible poems for the author page, and the author photo is by my nephew Ted Köhler who lives in the Netherlands and is beginning to build up a photography portfolio. The end of November is too close to the festive season for an official launch. That will be here in Manchester, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Tuesday 3 March.

The title was inspired by a Raymond Carver poem called My Boat. Raymond Carver is one of my all-time favourite poets. Someone I return to when I feel stale and in a negative frame of mind.

The poem Why are we in Vietnam? was written on a workshop at the wonderful Almassera Vella, Spain. We were to find any book in the library, open it at random and use a few lines as a starting point for a poem. Then we were to imagine finding a postcard inside the book. Where was the postcard from? What was written on the back? Who had sent it? I picked the paperback because of its intriguing title. It’s by Norman Mailer. I was surprised to find the lines and I imagined there would be an art card inside, a card I’d bought and forgotten about. It’s a reminder how working with “found” materials can easily trigger our creativity. The poem was commended in the 2016 Havant Open Poetry Competition.

 

Why are we in Vietnam?

It has held up the broken leg
of a single bed in the attic.
Everything is dusty now.
Who brought this Panther
paperback into my life?
Then the trail of the blood
took a bend, beat through dwarf alder.
The postcard isn’t of Cezanne’s gardener
seated upright in his chair,
or Venetian gondoliers.
Didn’t want to die in those woods,
wounded caribou…
Green lines, black dots,
small yellow triangles,
Miro’s insects and birds.
Neat black lines for the address,
the black box for a stamp.
To the left white space,
the white space of that Alaska.