ZOOMING WITH THE 1000 MONKEYS JULY 2023

Dònall started the ball rolling, and was followed by Peter Taylor, Ray Pool, Daphne Milne, Dennis Tomlinson and Rod Whitworth. We were very pleased to see Maria O'Brien, who read with us for the first time, on a theme of 'in-between-ness' and Tony Watts read us half a sequence about 'Ainsel Noone' and promised us the other half next month. Ray Pool had been watching old films and also remembering railway journeys. Daphne read a poem that had won a competition 'Instructions for Bottling a ship' and two about cricket, which made us smile. Rod read about a 'Boy with Green Hair'. July 4th is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Desnos, the French poet who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and murdered by ill treatment and neglect. Timothy Adès, who is the author of Surrealist, Lover, Resistant, a translation of Desnos' collected poems, read his translation of one of Desnos' most powerful resistant poems. Jo Mariner had poems about change and choice.

We had three single-poem readers: Rosie Barrett read us a poem published in Dartmoor Unearthed, the catalogue of an exhibition by the Moor Poets and Contemporary Markmakers — as it happened we had seen the exhibition and bought the book in the National Park Visitor Centre the weekend before. Jean Hall and Simon Williams also read poems of very high quality. It was, as always, an evening of good poetry and good company.

Next month we meet on August 1st. If you would like to join us, subscribe free to our newsletter and write to us in reply to one of our weekly emails.

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