The Woodstock Bookshop Poetry Competition 2011

The entries were once again of a high standard - the winner is George Guillain from Woodstock Primary School with his poem on the Iron Man, below. Runners up, all from Wootton by Woodstock Primary School, are Eve Catherine Jones, Henry Gough and Cayleigh Oliver. Congratulations to them all and many thanks to all the children who entered.

Iron Man

Taller than a

Skyscraper

Ten thousand tonnes

Of metal,

Recycled from

Ships and cars

Toasters kettles

Bolts and screws.

Grinding inside,

Rattling.

Old and rusty

Iron Man

Falling to bits

Collapsing

Clashing, clanking.

Pile of junk.

Melt him down and

Make new things,

Knives and forks and

Brand new tins.

Gillian Clarke

We had a great launch for Washing Lines last Saturday. Janie and Barbara had decked the Methodist Church with washing lines and poetry and the church was full. The photos show Gillian signing books after the reading, and chatting to Janie and her husband Nicholas just before the reading began. Barbara can just be seen on the far left.

Gillian Clarke's reading was wonderful - we have some CDs of her reading her work in case anyone would like a permanent reminder of how well she reads (the recording was not made at our talk so is not exclusively about washing). She began with tribute to the four miners who had just been found, reading an earlier poem in memory of another accident -

Six Bells - 28th June 1960

Perhaps a woman hanging out the wash

paused, hearing something, a sudden hush,

a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart,

holding in her arms the wet weight

of her wedding sheets, his shirts. Perhaps

heads lifted from the work of scrubbing steps,

hands stilled from wringing rainbows onto slate,

while below the town, deep in the pit

a rock-fall struck a spark from steel, and fired

the void, punched through the mine a fist

of blazing firedamp. As they died,

perhaps a silence, before sirens cried,

before the people gathered in the street,

before she'd finished hanging out her sheets.

She read a lot from Washing Lines, and from her own work. A treat was to hear unpublished, recent poems, including one just completed that day. She also read Shirt of a Lad, an anonymous poem translated by Tony Conran, which will surely be in a future edition of Washing Lines.

Anthea Bell and Boyd Tonkin

The photos show, from top to bottom, Anthea Bell signing books after her discussion with Boyd Tonkin; with Melissa from Pushkin Press; signing again and with Melissa. The Methodist Church was full (you can see the cross just over Melissa's shoulder). Pushkin Press produce the most beautiful paperback editions of literature in translation and have published many of Stefan Zweig's books, translated by Anthea Bell - for a look at their superb catalgue see here.
The other small publisher whose books we stocked for the evening is Arabia and Haus
publishing, who publish Rafik Schami. Schami was born in Syria but has lived in political exile in Germany since 1970. He is the winner of numerous international prizes and is among Germany's bestselling novelists - Anthea Bell has translated two of his books, The Dark Side of Love and The Calligrapher's Secret, and she picked out the former as one of her favourite translations. Her most recent translation for Haus is The Indies Enterprise by Erik Orsenna which is coming out very soon (we have early copies here - it is a fantastic story of the effects of discovery.

Boyd Tonkin asked excellent questions and, while Anthea was modestly describing her work as craftsmanship, he declared she was like Yehudi Menuhin, a virtuoso able to bring writers to life in another language. We were lucky to hear her.

On 9 October 2011 at the French Institute Anthea Bell will be sharing her passion for translation, and her experience of taking on upfront the most challenging of them all, the very Gallic Asterix!
Book online on http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/bdandcomicspassion/

Christine Holmes novels

Oxford was recently saddened to hear of the loss of author Christine Holmes. Holmes is probably better known as an historian of Captain Cook and Anglo-Saxon Benson, but she was also a novelist. The Lily & The Crocodile (published in Germany as The Queen’s Physician) is an exuberant read set inside Cleopatra’s royal quarters and beyond. The Song of Deborah, set a thousand years earlier in Palestine, is an intimate tale of two heroic women in the Biblical time before Kings….. Roke Elm is a gem of a modern story set in southern Oxfordshire. This is a truly magical tale of gentle love, and loss, rooted in the very fabric around Benson and the Chilterns. All three novels (in special paperback editions printed for Holmes’s memorial in Oxford) are available from The Woodstock Bookshop at £10 each.

Looking Back - Basil Mitchell

Professor Basil Mitchell, a Woodstock resident for many years, died in June 2011. He had a long and distinguished career as an academic, mainly in Oxford, where he was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Keble College, Oxford, 1947-67, Emeritus Fellow of Keble, 1981, Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Oxford University, Fellow of Oriel College, 1968-84, and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel, 1984. Before his death he published Looking Back: on faith, philosophy and friends in Oxford (£19.95). It is a fascinating account of his life and philosophy and very well written. If anyone has difficulty getting hold of a copy we are happy to send it out.

Gillian Clarke and Anthea Bell

The programme for the year's Independent Woodstock Literature Festival is now available and we are hosting two events as part of it:

On Thursday 15 September at 7pm, Anthea Bell, the very distinguished and versatile translator, is being interviewed by Boyd Tonkin (literary editor of the Independent who has a particular interest in translated fiction). Anthea Bell translates from French and German - she is the translator of many children's books, among them the Nicholas books and Asterix - see here. She is also the translator of a wide range of crime and literary fiction including several books for the European crime specialist Bitter Lemon Press, W G Sebald's Austerlitz (for which she won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize) and many Stefan Zweig novels - most recently a new translation of Beware of Pity.

On Saturday 17 September at 6pm, Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales and chair of the judges for this year's T S Eliot prize for poetry, is reading from her own work and also launching Washing Lines, a beautifully produced anthology of poems collected and published by Janie Hextall (who works in the shop) and Barbara McNaught. For an article in The Oxford Times see here.

Tickets (£8) are available by phone from 01865 305305, or from The Feathers Hotel Woodstock, or online at http://www.woodstockliteraryfestival.com/.

Richard Webster

Very sad news. Richard Webster has died, aged only 60. People who have come to the shop since we started three years ago will remember him well - he worked here for a year or so. I met him soon after I opened because he came in and introduced himself and said that he had thought of opening a bookshop in Woodstock after he stopped running the Southwold Bookshop and moved to Oxford. He hadn't quite got round to it and was rather relieved that I had done it instead, so he could continue to write while coming in to the Woodstock Bookshop and enjoying a stint as a bookseller whenever I went away. He used to call it living vicariously.

He was hugely supportive and I will miss him enormously. Not that he was uncritical. 'Rachel,' he said, shortly after we first met. 'Coming into your bookshop is like trying to read the front page of The Times without any headlines. Have you thought about putting up some labels?' It was great to have someone who believed in me but would also challenge me. 'I see you've been busy again,' he would note, as he came in to the shop after a week or two's absence. Which meant too much stock. 'A bookshop is like a river,' he would explain. 'You need the banks to hold it steady, the occasional big boulder to keep things together (such as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations or the complete works of Shakespeare) - but the centre should flow freely.' I look around now and see too many books face out hiding other books (Richard would go round whenever he was here making little piles of authors with only the top book face out) and vow to do a clear-out in his memory.

He did his best to promote the shop and to keep me on the right path. He was the one who helped me put together this website and he read it regularly, always emailing me immediately he spotted a spelling mistake or error. He would bring friends in on quiet Sunday afternoons. He made sure the shop opened through a winter of snow, driving in from Hayfield Road whenever I got stuck in Dean and ringing me with reports of weather conditions in Woodstock. He made sticky labels for me because he thought the shop needed them. He was always there, on the end of the phone, for IT crises or to share gossip about the book trade. And we sold a lot of his lovely cards, too. He had been writing a book on Disgust - I wonder how much had been completed at his death.