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I read recently Seamus Heaney saying ‘Poetry is a domestic art’ meaning, I think, that it has to be kept close to our hearts and homes. I don’t believe that you have to experience a thing before you write about it but there has to be something – an image, a memory, a line – that, by being fundamentally yours, has the power to lead you into that experience.
The Hidden Histories project is a bit like the poetic equivalent of Think Global, Act Local. The best stories touch us all whoever, wherever, we are and I wanted to provoke this sense of wonder at, and link in with, the past; stories as stones that when thrown cause water to ripple out towards whoever is standing at the edge.
As it happened the poems I received showed their authors only too happy to step outside their immediate emotional concerns.
The range of subjects was extraordinary: from Kitty Jay, the 18th century farmhand who hanged herself and her unborn child in a Dartmoor barn* to Sean O’Casey’s gift to Totnes train station, from sitting in a Tudor house looking out of a window to an indictment of the Dorset slave traders, from the ghost of Cornish tin miner struggling for life in a flooded mine to an owl made homeless in one of the region’s ‘desirable’ barn conversions.
Greta Stoddart, Devon 2008
* click here to read poem Kitty Jay Speaks
Greta Stoddart
Each poem has been selected for its ability to delight, provoke, amuse or astound
the listener, reflecting a variety of styles and subject matter. Among many wonders,
enjoy a journey with the wrong map or share the delights of making love by the reflected
light of cows; meet the night-
“We are thrilled and delighted that 'Uncharted' has turned out to be utterly brilliant. In fact, not just ‘thrilled and delighted’, but we are merrily glowing about the success of the project, the fun we have editing and recording the CD, and the opportunities it will inevitably bring for Moor Poets work to reach wider audiences.”
Lucy Lepchani, ‘Uncharted’ Project Coordinator
