How to Clean the House and party in a Bookshop at the same time

           1.  Open a new file in  your PC .

           2.  Name it 'Housework.'

           3.  Send it to  the RECYCLE  BIN.

           4.  Empty the RECYCLE  BIN.

           5.  Your PC will  ask you,
            'Are you sure you want to delete  Housework  permanently?'

           6.  Calmly answer, 'Yes' and press mouse button firmly  ...

           7.  Feel better?


Works for me. 


One of those viral email things my mother sent me this morning. Oh if only... Our house can only be described as 'gritty'  - you know, with dust and all the other bits that land on surfaces when you aren't looking. It needs a good clean and all those ridiculous piles of paper and STUFF needing sorting, and this  should have happened yesterday but I was partying at  Rona Gallery - the local bookshop where I work every Friday - celebrating its tenth birthday. 


We had bubbly and an art exhibition opening to kick the day off, Peter Rabbit stories in the afternoon (my daughter dressed up as a giant Peter thanks to Penguin Books, and the children in the audience played all sorts of 'characters' - from sparrows to carrots! - we had a giant Spot the dog, too, played by the bookshop owners' grand-daughter Ariana) and then there was a Writers and Readers Party in the evening.


The Party starred guest poet, Fiona Kidman, reading from the gorgeous Where Your Left Hand Rests (with all the terrific stories she tells that explain and inform the poems), and there was an Open Mike for our local writers to stand up and read some of their own work. It turned out to be the most exhilarating couple of hours as we heard Fiona's poems, children's poetry - some from the school journals, poems set in and around Eastbourne and the bays, poems set elsewhere with stories attached, stories about works in progress, a snippet of prose ... We have nearly 30 local writers who have published, or are about to or really really want to, and half of them stood up to read.


Many of us work alone and hadn't met each other - or only knew each other by name. Last night was a coming together - a time of acknowledgement and recognition - and it was stimulating, insightful, fun... may there be many more of them. And may Rona Gallery, too, go on and on. The owners, Richard and Joanna Ponder, are the tireless owners who battle to keep this sanctuary going here in Eastbourne. I, for one, feel very very lucky to have them. 

Tuesday Poem: Pruning roses by Fiona Kidman

Pruning roses
for Joanna


That year we lived in France
I nipped home in July, the cold
set of winter, to prune the roses,


or so I said, although there was
other business too. I oiled
my shiny shears and set upon


the annual task, slicing
clean on the diagonal:
they're a semi-circle of white


Icebergs planted in friable soil
stretching beneath the green native
trees surrounding our house. 


There were four of us there
on the day of their ritual
planting: my daughter, her daughter,
               her brother's wife and me. 


We hummed wedding songs
in soft anticipation of the first
buds and then when they came


you wore a scarlet dress
and married your love
and we danced on the lawn. 


                             Fiona Kidman 

Pruning Roses is one of my favourite poems in Dame Fiona Kidman's collection Where Your Left Hand Rests, published this year to celebrate her 70th birthday, and already in the Top 10 of the Bestsellers' List. Like many of the poems in this gorgeous book, Pruning Roses is about family and the stuff that binds. Fiona writes simply and powerfully of family history and ritual and strength and love and joy. 

She also writes about what it is to be a woman who writes, and takes us from a bunch of poets in Thorndon to meeting a son in Greece to the year she spent in France as the Katherine Mansfield fellow. That's the year Fiona Kidman sat down at the writer's desk in that small important room and decided she'd worked hard at writing fiction for so long, and now she would work hard at her poems again. 


For those overseas readers who are new to Fiona's work - she has published eight novels including the award-winning The Book of Secrets and The Captive Wife, many collections of poetry and short fiction, and her non-fiction includes a recent two-volume memoir. Fiona has been awarded a Damehood, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and the French Legion of Honour, and yet the last lines of her book are typically modest: ' ....My epitaph may be that she was a small woman/who spent her days in small airports flying/on very small aeroplanes to middle-sized towns.' 

As I said in my review when Where your Left Hand Rests was launched - some books fill you up, and this is one of those: its exquisite end papers and illustrations using vintage fabrics are just a start. The poems nestle inside - small treasures. 

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill.