Wavelengths

WAVELENGTHS: a dialogue in light and sound
by Belinda Singleton and Kathryn Southworth

Kathryn Southworth was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in Camden Town, London and Prinknash, Gloucestershire. She is married with three surviving children and three grandchildren.

She has always written poetry but returned to it in earnest only after a long career as an academic in midlands universities. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Head of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and held senior management posts there and at Newman University and also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency. She has been a governor of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust and is currently a governor of Rose Bruford College of Drama and Theatre Arts.

She has published poetry and reviews in several magazines and anthologies and reads at a number of London poetry venues, including the Poetry Café and Torriano Meeting House. The literary canon informs her writing, as does her Catholic faith, surreptitiously.

Belinda Singleton comes from a business background in strategic management, primarily linked to written and oral communication. This included such hands-on experience as setting up and assessing courses at Wormwood Scrubs and Eton.

She took up poetry again as a core passion in 2008. She has been published in poetry magazines and anthologies, mostly in the UK, and has been placed or commended in various national poetry competitions. She won the John Clare Open Poetry Competition Prize in 2011.

She reads at several venues in London and has been Chairman of the long-standing Wey Poets group, based in Guildford, for the past five years. She is editor of their anthology Ripples (publication, Autumn 2016).

Carla Scarano comments in her review on 'London Grip':

'We know from space our planet’s blue
from all the sea,
the air blue only for us beneath
the merciful stratosphere that deflects
the fury of the sun’s X-rated rays
that otherwise would blind us.
Just as God’s light is sifted.

We look through glass stained blue as Chartres
to see the sky.
(“Blue”, Kathryn Southworth)

Significantly, Singleton’s poem concentrates on visual images, on colours that emphasise our limited vision, as we cannot perceive all the hues present in nature; but it also opens up to possible developments in the sphere of light. Southworth’s poem, on the other hand, connects the universe with the tangible experience of Chartres’ stained-glass windows. The experience of the blue is therefore mediated by the everyday and, at the same time, has a wide angle, so there are almost infinite possibilities of perceiving the blue.
Throughout the collection, the poems disclose the fluid condition of reality where ‘distances separate/then merge’ and ‘Yet still between shadow and light/lie places between particles’ that talk to us ‘of the weather and home’ (“Between’ and Twilight”, Belinda Singleton). This is also a place of loss and gain, of ambivalence, where the relentless exchanging of messages seems to be central:

With luck, such moments multiply, their place
is self-contained: it’s love without regret.
But there’s one memory where we hold no trace
on shape or time, uncertain if we’ve met.
Loss rides the longest wavelength, fills the space
whose information has not reached us yet.
(“A Measure of Light”, Belinda Singleton)'

ISBN 978-1-907435-87-4
Perfect bound paperback 40 pages 15x21cm
RRP £8.00

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