HOW TO BUY THE BOOK: It's available from Amazon or from the publishers at a reduced rate. Email postmaster@thebookmill.co.uk for details.
The Norman Nicholson Society and The Book Mill are proud to announce the launch of The Unpredicted Spring, a unique anthology of poems written as the world struggled to cope with the Covid pandemic.
This collection of 42 poems represents the best of more than 200 worldwide entries to a Lockdown Poetry Competition organised by the Society in 2020. It includes the two winning poems – Learning Whimbrel by Martyn Halsall, former Poet in Residence at Carlisle Cathedral, and Silently Ignoring the World by 14-year-old Californian-born, Cambridgeshire-based Katie Deutsch.
This latest addition to the literature of the pandemic is published by The Book Mill and available from Amazon at £10.99 or at a discounted rate from the publishers who should be contacted by email in the first instance, postmaster@thebookmill.co.uk.
Editor of the anthology Kathleen Jones, who also judged the competition, said: ‘What I like about the book is the diversity; that we’ve got people from all over the world with very different experiences of lockdown; people of all age groups, and they are all writing about how they are coping and the new things they are observing.
‘Being put in situations like this does inspire amazing poetry. People can often put into words in poems things that they can’t talk about, deeply internalised things. Some people who had never written poetry before began writing.
‘Some of the poems I liked best were written by the under-18 age group. It thrilled me to see so many writing poetry – and writing good poetry, which has a fresh quality of looking at the world. That for me was one of the best things that’s come out of this book’.
Chair of the Norman Nicholson Society Charlie Lambert said: ‘What the combined forces of Government laws, peer pressure and infections can never do is to keep in check the human spirit. Imagination will not be quarantined, and we can see this in this very moving yet uplifting anthology’.
The title, The Unpredicted Spring, is taken from a poem by Norman Nicholson himself which is also printed in the book. The poem, Early March, was written during another time of national emergency, the Second World War. ‘We did not expect this,’ it begins, ‘we were not ready for this…’
He could have been writing about the coronavirus in 2020.
posted 1/3/21
This collection of 42 poems represents the best of more than 200 worldwide entries to a Lockdown Poetry Competition organised by the Society in 2020. It includes the two winning poems – Learning Whimbrel by Martyn Halsall, former Poet in Residence at Carlisle Cathedral, and Silently Ignoring the World by 14-year-old Californian-born, Cambridgeshire-based Katie Deutsch.
This latest addition to the literature of the pandemic is published by The Book Mill and available from Amazon at £10.99 or at a discounted rate from the publishers who should be contacted by email in the first instance, postmaster@thebookmill.co.uk.
Editor of the anthology Kathleen Jones, who also judged the competition, said: ‘What I like about the book is the diversity; that we’ve got people from all over the world with very different experiences of lockdown; people of all age groups, and they are all writing about how they are coping and the new things they are observing.
‘Being put in situations like this does inspire amazing poetry. People can often put into words in poems things that they can’t talk about, deeply internalised things. Some people who had never written poetry before began writing.
‘Some of the poems I liked best were written by the under-18 age group. It thrilled me to see so many writing poetry – and writing good poetry, which has a fresh quality of looking at the world. That for me was one of the best things that’s come out of this book’.
Chair of the Norman Nicholson Society Charlie Lambert said: ‘What the combined forces of Government laws, peer pressure and infections can never do is to keep in check the human spirit. Imagination will not be quarantined, and we can see this in this very moving yet uplifting anthology’.
The title, The Unpredicted Spring, is taken from a poem by Norman Nicholson himself which is also printed in the book. The poem, Early March, was written during another time of national emergency, the Second World War. ‘We did not expect this,’ it begins, ‘we were not ready for this…’
He could have been writing about the coronavirus in 2020.
posted 1/3/21
HOW TO BUY THE BOOK: It's available from Amazon or from the publishers at a reduced rate. Email postmaster@thebookmill.co.uk for details.
VIEW THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH VIDEO: