Last Friday the Leaf Press chapbook launch at Planet Earth Poetry went well, aside from the fact I ran out of books before the reading started!
I went first, because I had the fewest books, having sold my remaining 3 copies of The Earth’s Kitchen before I read. Actually I had plenty, as I brought some of my other works along, including the recently deeply discounted and suddenly out of print Sunday Dinners, which we launched in Victoria only last June. I have snapped up the few remaining copies so it’s now officially a rare collectable, like Crosswords from Frog Hollow, and Old Habits, from Thistledown/Slow Dancer. Happily, Cartography, from Oolichan, still enjoys currency as an increasingly rare first edition.
Next up was Pam Porter,
who read some ghazals from her new chapbook, This Awakening to Light: a Year of Ghazals, a sequence she’d begun when they started rattling off her pen with surprising ease at a writing retreat. As she said in her introduction, the ghazal is not for everyone, but it obviously suited her well.
Yvonne Blomer brought the evening to an end with Landscapes and Home, another sequence of ghazals that periodically followed some of the formal rules (such as including the poet’s name in the concluding couplet) and drew on her Zimbabwean origins and Victoria location, which gave the poems. A Zimbabwean friend of mine who had come along said she found the imagery rang true for her.
