Poetry boom! Apparently, there has been enough research to support the fact that during the period of the pandemic the popularity of poetry greatly increased. Not only were people writing more verse but they were also consuming more, either through listening to podcasts and online poetry readings, or buying poetry books. In a recent issue of the magazine The Oldie, Thomas W Hodgkinson asked poets why they thought this was the case. One poet said that it ‘makes you think and feel outside of yourself’ and the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage suggested that when people are in need of care and consideration, poetry, which is so careful with language, meets the mood.
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T.S. Eliot reads "The Wasteland"
This week’s newsletter to you is all about poetry, well one particular poet and one poem in particular. Some time ago, way back in December 2021, I received an email from Clare E Rhoden asking PS if they might be interested in publishing an anthology of stories inspired by the poem The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. The plan was to publish the book around October 2022 which would mark the centenary of its first publication in the inaugural issue of The Criterion in October 1922. We said a resounding yes, so here is Clare to tell you a little more about the anthology FROM THE WASTELAND.
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FROM THE WASTELAND celebrates the centenary of Eliot’s poem with nineteen brand new tales of fantasy, ghost tales, horror, dystopia and science fiction. These stories will startle, mesmerise, and amuse you, as they explore current issues with a storyteller’s long gaze. This is the quality TS Eliot indulged as he surveyed the ruins of western civilisation after the chaos and disruption of the Great War, and the infamous pandemic influenza we now know too well. A hundred years later, we’re more jaded, but perhaps slightly more hopeful. For we believe in the restorative powers of fiction to lift our hearts and strengthen us for the odyssey ahead.
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Introduction to FROM THE WASTELAND by Clare Rhoden
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land distils a wealth of emotion and literary tradition to evoke the distress and loss of the Great War. In startling images, Eliot mourns the lost golden age and the forgotten wisdoms. Mingling the fantastical with the everyday, Eliot shows us confusion and loss, a beautiful world laid waste, lives upended and the struggles of survivors. At its essence is an affirmation of the value of life. The poem says as much to us today as it did a hundred years ago.
As I write this, there’s a terrible and ongoing war with Russia in Ukraine. Any sense we had that wars like that will never happen again is gone. We seem no further advanced than our forebears, condemned in a very human way to resort to violence to achieve senseless ends.
I once noted that war stories never go out of style; neither do stories that question and challenge the destruction we visit upon ourselves and our beloved planet. A hundred years after the publication of “The Waste Land”, it’s fitting to harness storytellers to the task.
How this came about.
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During one of Melbourne’s gazillion lockdowns, I was stopped in my tracks by the eerie atmosphere of the deserted park where I walked my dog. Masked up and sticking to the most uninspiring, least attractive areas for my daily walk, keeping away from people, I was listening to dark music from video games and thinking how grim the world had become.
As often, I thought of my studies into Great War literature with its foreboding and despairing stories. That, together with the pandemic, the moody melodies and an unsure future, swirled my thinking to how TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” reaches back to old legends and forward into the future in its uncanny paean to the destruction of society.
You know what would be cool? I thought to myself. I could write a fantasy story inspired by “The Waste Land”. Energised, I took to home and looked up the nostalgic ode for reference. It struck me that the poem’s centenary was in ten months from then—October 2022. What about that? A whole book of speculative fiction stories stirred by Eliot’s teeming poem whirled in my mind’s eye.
I spun the idea to authorly contacts, all too impacted in some way by the pandemic. We leapt at the possibility to tackle a brand new project, one with the shimmer of a clear goal, defined structure and specific timeline in the uncertainty of our world.
What kind of desolation lives here?
A wasteland is in your heart or in your mind. It’s in your relationship, your family, your neighbourhood, your country. Wastelands thrive in palaces and parliaments, on continents and in oceans. An entire planet can become a wasteland stretching to the edge of the universe.
The stories in this anthology span why, when, what is a wasteland. A wasteland is war and pestilence. It’s a strange god, an alien being, a vengeful spirit, each worming its way in. There’s inner wasteland of confusion, domestic wasteland of violence, ravaged wasteland of climate change. Meet the frozen emptiness of deep space, the heaving crowds of a metropolis. A queen of realms confronting a wasteland, the smallest child of an impoverished world baffled by it.
HOW each character faces the barren darkness makes each story chant.
—Clare Rhoden
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And here are a selection of introductory passages from six of the nineteen stories in FROM THE WASTELAND.
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A WINTER RESPITE by Clare Rhoden
On the second day they came to a half-ruined village. The shelling had been bad around here, and the cobbled streets were pitted and rucked with holes. Most of the houses were roofless, a good number of them unrecognisable among the rubble. Josephine led the children through the misty, silent laneways, the baby heavy on her back. Behind them the guns barked and roared, the sounds now more distant. Perhaps they could rest here a day or two, before they followed other civilians in their flight south. Josephine was so tired. She should be. She’d walked through the night carrying a sturdy infant, shepherding the two-year-old twins, helping the eight-year-old to manage the other two children. They were all tired. She stopped and looked about her. “Mamzelle! The mairie, look!” She peered through the murky air. Gilbert was right. One wing of the village’s old stone and brick mairie was still standing, a dirty and tattered tricolour drooping over the arched entryway. “Let’s see,” she agreed, and they trudged forward through the broken arch and into the cracked courtyard. Gilbert found the energy from somewhere to run ahead, shoving open a venerable door of silvered wood. “A kitchen, Mamzelle,” he called over his shoulder. “And only one dead person in it.” “Good,” said Josephine. They’d met enough corpses and attendant ghosts to last a lifetime.
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SHE WHO WALKS BEHIND YOU by Leanbh Pearson
I stepped over the broken wall, chunks of stone and mortar scattered around like fallen giants. The cannon blast had broken apart the fortifications on this side of the castle. Ahead, a stone pathway led towards the bridge, the cobblestones now cracked and broken. The sky above me was an angry burnt orange. Between the ruins of the castle and the expanse of the battlefield where I might find him was the wood. It was haunted long before armies ravaged the land and the more blood that seeped into those roots only twisted it further. Still, I must venture there to find him. My Charles.
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FRAGMENTS OF RUIN by B.P. Marshall
I’m glitching. As we slog through this endless dusty boneyard towards our goal, I’m frustrated as my brain briefly disconnects from understanding what I see. I may have a brain tumour. Rads, and exposure to herbicides, will do that. Or damage from bad days at the Rape Farm. Or my implants are simply old, infected, or both. Also, to be pragmatic and mindfully choose my reality—my truth: mentally, I’m no longer stable. I can vaguely remember what the medications did, and that in some ways they helped, but now, here, all that stuff happened in another, pre-Collapse world, long since buried in an unmarked grave hidden beyond thick tattered cobwebs of memory. I glance at the lichen on the rocks and because I’m glitching, I don’t properly see it. Yes, my still-functional eyes see the lichen, and my prefrontal cortex readily identifies it as lichen, but the glitching means these two neurological events no longer connect to all the parts of my brain. Emotionally, I am, briefly, dead. Normally I like lichen. While I’m glitching, I can only remember that I like lichen. I like lichen because I greatly admire the staunch and pointless bastardry of a creature that can live in the midst of death behaving/seeming like one already long dead, only to rise again and flourish with the first tincture of that universal solvent, water. I envy lichen’s parched and placid persistence.
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MOUNTAIN OF DEATH by Austin P. Sheehan
Whips cracked, thunder rolled, and my heart raced against the setting sun. Below me, my mare Grisant galloped across no-man’s land, over plains full of the dead and dying, through low valleys like ragged wounds in the earth. The stench of malice filled the air as we drew closer to the storm. Our destination was Mount Vestian, the fist of rock that rose far above the blood-soaked earth, and from where the whole of the Kingdom of Azmar could be seen. Hours earlier, King Arathusa had called me to the arcane enclave at the heart of Niphen, the ancient rock-wrought keep which was the home of the rulers of our once-proud kingdom. Lit by magic, protected by age-old spells, the enclave had served as a sanctuary for the Kings and Queens of Azmar during their toughest times, and very few were permitted to enter.
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A SHADOW IN THIS RED ROCK by Louise Zedda Sampson
I’d told myself that the next funeral after Mother’s would be my own—but I’d not imagined anything like this. I’m shackled, stuck. I watch from a distance, unable to say my final words to you, or about you. They gather around the casket, the scatter of mourners. We didn’t have many friends. The sun is bright and strong. Birds sing in the trees. You would say there’s no room for joy in death. Funerals should be fast and over—life is for the living, and the dead are for the worms. Your mother watches on, resentment seething like a noxious cloud. She doesn’t want to be here, to say these last goodbyes. I see through a miasma of red. Think about what led us here. Memory takes me home.
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APRIL by Francesca Bussey
Here I am Sal, right here, under the bricks at the back door. It’s me. Well, me and all these crawlers—these worms, these earwigs, these wrinkling millipedes. Oh, and Christmas beetles now too—mindless bumblers, setting me all on edge with their dread scuttling. Dead now. All of us. I can feel you walking over me Sal—feel you padding out to get greens, stopping at the gate to do the unlatch, pausing by the back door to settle the basket better on your hip before turning the knob. Can you feel me? Here I am, Sal. Right with you. Below you. Feeling you. That time crying on the back step? I got salty tears. I like to sing for you Sal, when I can, when I’ve saved up. . . Shall we gather at the riiiiiiiiivah You smell good too Sal. Creamy and soft. Do you ever smell my smells, Sal? My milky breath, my earthy skin. Here I am, Sal. HERE I AM!
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FROM THE WASTELAND will be available this fall as an unsigned hardcover for £22. A signed edition limited to 100 copies will also be available for £35.
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DON’T PANIC!!! I’ve been flooded with emails from customers wondering where their copy of NEEDFUL THINGS by Stephen King is.
Rest assured we are working our way through all the orders and postal collections are being made every week, although as I’ve said in a past newsletter there have been a couple of strike days with more planned. When your parcel is about to be collected you will receive a ‘DISPATCHED ‘ email.
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No reviews this week but I do have details of a very special event celebrating the 30th-anniversary of the first screening of GHOSTWATCH written by Stephen Volk, and directed by Lesley Manning.
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On Halloween night, 1992, 11 million viewers tuned into the BBC to watch what they believed to be a live broadcast from a haunted house in Northolt, London. The rest, as they say, is history. Audiences were terrified, switchboards were inundated with complaints, and the BBC disowned the show. But underneath the mania and controversy lies a fascinating and often deeply disturbing exploration of how trauma and abuse can haunt both the mind and the body.
Ghostwatch
superfans Celluloid Screams and immersive cinema pioneers Live Cinema
UK present a special "one night only" 30th anniversary live cinema
experience, resurrecting the original spirit of the broadcast for a
hauntingly-good immersive celebration of the paranormal, Parky and
Pipes. Followed by a Q&A with director Lesley Manning and writer
Stephen Volk, peek behind the curtains, and re-enter the glory hole . . .
FULL DETAILS OF EVENT HERE: https://www.facebook.com/photo...
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Over here the nights are getting shorter and the trees are putting on a magnificent display of autumnal colours which will soon be descending onto the greensward and we’ll be out there with the brooms sweeping up piles of leaves. Talking of brooms, watch out for next week’s Halloween announcements. Meanwhile, enjoy your weekend be it either snuggling up or sunbathing by the pool, as long as a book is involved.
Hugs to you all.
Pete & Nicky
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