Welcome to our first poetry sidequest!

We’re trying something new in this episode. Once or twice a month, Christina will read a poem she found in her search for the muse.

Poetry can fire up your creativity in a different way than prose can. Here’s a great article on how reading poetry can improve your writing regardless of the genre you write in: https://www.iuniverse.com/en/resources/writing-and-editing/6-ways-poetry-can-improve-your-writing

Whoever you are and whatever brought you here, we hope this poem sparks your imagination and gets your creativity flowing.

If you have any comments or suggestions for future featured poems, please contact us at: creativequesters@gmail.com

About the poet:

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She descended from long lines of servants and skilled farm workers. Her father was a farm lorry driver, and her family lived for eight years in a third of a big Victorian farmhouse belonging to his employer. The small surrounding wood was an oasis amongst farmland already devastated by the post-war farming revolution, in which hedges disappeared and chemicals were sprayed from aircraft.

She won a scholarship to Oxford and moved to Gloucestershire after marriage. Most of her working life was spent in her husband’s tiny metal finishing business. This was combined with many hours with long-lived, unaffordable ponies on the hills, where there were both woods and buzzards…

Despite a deplorable talent for discovering distractions, Alison has published ten collections of poetry. Gallop, her Selected Poems, was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her latest collection is Thorpeness, Carcanet, 2022, from which “Woods, and Us” is taken. Poems from Thorpeness have been featured on BBC Radio 4, in The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian.  

Alison’s main interest in poetry is smuggling poems out into the wider world. You can find her website, with many poems at: https://alisonbrackenbury.wordpress.com/  You will also find her, with many nature photographs, on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Alison is currently revising the only prose book she intends ever to write. Village is a celebration of the extraordinary place and people with whom she grew up. It includes ghosts, wheelbarrows, the pioneering woman archaeologist who lived down Long Lane… and many interruptions by robins… The villagers have been extremely unruly and savage pruning of the MS is taking place. But she hopes to salvage the most precious stories, Toots the sheepdog… and the robins. News and queries from Village will keep filtering through on Alison’s accounts on social media! In between winter bird-feeding…