Surrey Unearthed – and Dorking Talking
Surrey Poetry and Summer heat
It was a hot evening on Monday and the 38 people crammed into Narnia didn’t make it feel any cooler as Mole Valley Poets unveiled their latest anthology. Narnia? The back room of the Old House pub in Dorking, so named because you enter through the wardrobe. There were no lions on Monday but there were a few references to the Witches Broom Tree, to be found on Abinger Roughs.
The theme of the anthology, Surrey Unearthed, was linked to the arts project being run by Surrey Hills Arts and the poems shared on the night covered a range of subjects from Surrey chalk to the Adonis Blue by way of the Lesser Celandine, Silent Pool, Box Hill and the River Mole. Styles and structure also varied, with Gogyoshi rubbing shoulders with Pantoums, concrete poetry with freer verse. Illustrations were included for the first time, including the stunning cover by Mark Shakespeare, reproduced above,
Somehow we all crammed into the room, some of us ate pizza and the pub kept the drinks flowing. Attendees told me they felt like they had actually been on a walk through the Surrey countryside and the anthology was pronounced a success.
Dorking Talking
As so often, one thing leads to another and among the audience on Monday night was Isabel Morris who held her own event, Dorking Talking, three days later at Viva restaurant, just up the road from the pub. Another well supported evening with tickets sold out – so there is an appetite for poetry and the spoken word in the Mole Valley. Isabel was the star of the show, sharing her personal journey through honest and humorous performance poetry which managed to be both performance and poetry – a difficult balance to strike. The evening also featured a couple of open mic sessions and a guest poet – Louise Etheridge from Guildford and the Dirty Carols who managed to delight everybody by insulting Dorking and all points west (and east, come to that). This is planned to be the first of a series and I’m looking forward to the next one.
There was even an opportunity to plug upcoming shows. Louise plugged the Dirty Carols show at Guildford Fringe (14th July, The Back Room of The Star, Guildford) and naturally I plugged Sex is Another Language (same venue, 6th July, part of Guildford Fringe as is Louise’s show) and on the 5th at Leith Hill Place.