On the 26th June I will be taking part in Salt Publishing’s Cyclone virtual book tour, providing a blog stop for Scottish poet Andrew Philip and his excellent first collection The Ambulance Box.

The conversation with Andrew and myself will be focusing on his four poems, the Hebridean Thumbnails.

I’ve long been interested in the most compressed forms of poetry, so the monostich — the one-line poem — is a natural way to go. I read about the form years back in the pocketbooks anthology “Atoms of Delight”, but was galvanised into writing them when Julie Johnstone intimated that she was looking for monostiches for island magazine.  In fact, these “Hebridean Thumbnails” are only a selection of the sequence of monostiches — in correspondence with Julie, I called it a “seam” — that appeared in island. The others didn’t seem to fit quite so well with the rest of “The Ambulance Box”.

*Excerpt from conversation with Andrew Philip

Cut and paste the URL below or click on the link to find out more information about Andrew and his work.

 http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844714919.htm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Event. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.