I’m delighted to announce my new collection is published today by Sea Crow Press from Cape Cod, USA. Mary at Sea Crow has been brilliant to work with and I’m delighted to join their roster.
Here’s a post taken from the Sea Crow Press Blog:
Sea Crow Press poet Marc Woodward blogs about his new collection of poems Shaking the Persimmon Tree, available now wherever good books are sold. Read on for the story of how a formerly derelict house in Italy went on to inspire the beautiful words and cover art that make this volume truly special.
Many years ago I bought a tumble-down ruin in a remote village in central Italy. It wasn’t a lot of money and it had that sweet dereliction that the English in particular seem to find irresistible.
The man who took me to the property and helped push through the brambles and bamboo, was a geometra, a sort of cross between an architect and a surveyor. He was quite forgiving and enthusiastic about the house — even when we barged open the broken door and little black scorpions fell from the frame — smiling confidently as he estimated how little it would cost to restore…
The Italians have a term for naive customers (the English mostly): ‘Pollo’ —chickens waiting to be plucked. Ah well… roll forward several fraught years which involved cashing in all my meagre savings and stretching out my credit cards (I termed it ‘an adventure in spending’), and I had a pretty little Maiella stone house up a green lane looking across at a castle and a mountain and the roofs of the nearby village — and a thumping great loan. Eventually, I met some lovely Americans who bought a share in the property and it all worked out okay in the end.
And that’s how I got my bolt hole in Abruzzo — a place to write and read, to drink local wine and have long conversations during which I understand nothing but get to smile and nod a lot. See my poem Luigi’s Calendar for an example of this.
When I was compiling the poems for this book I felt it should centre around two themes: Italy, where many of the poems were written — or at least started — and my own recent diagnosis with early-onset Parkinson’s. Of course, Covid came along, and naturally, I wrote some poems referencing that and thinking about health generally — including the health of the planet, a common thread in my work.
But those two initial themes remained and came together in my poem The Boar from which the title of the collection Shaking The Persimmon Tree is taken.
There is a persimmon tree at the end of the garden, past the olives and the rustling bamboo. The fruit ripens very late and still hangs on the tree after the winter snow has crowned the far mountains of the Gran Sasso — the highest peaks in the Apennine chain. In my previous post for the Sea Crow blog I explained a little about the mythology and meaning of the persimmon and why it has significance in the context of these poems — please seek it out and have a read.
We had previously taken a photograph with the ripening persimmon in the foreground and the white mountain in the distance, and I realised this would make the ideal cover. I’d even used the image in a video reading of The Boar.
However the original photo was lost, all I had was a low-resolution copy buried somewhere in my social media. Nevertheless, after much scrolling, I located it and sent it to my nephew Jesse, a very talented artist who paints gorgeous landscapes – check out www.JesseWoodwardart.com – and he created the beautiful painting that now adorns the book. Of course, I must also say thank you to Mary Petiet at Sea Crow Pressand PopKitty design for putting the whole work together so beautifully. I’m delighted with the result and hope readers will enjoy both the poetry and the artwork.
I admit to approaching this book with a little trepidation as I so liked Marc’s first book ‘Hide Songs’ I was worried he wouldn’t have continued that quiet, sensitive, observational voice. But of course I needn’t have worried. This collection is, if anything even better. In it Marc talks about Italy, Parkinson’s disease, Nature and Covid with poems that are carefully crafted and often pick out the small, easily missed things as well as taking in the bigger picture. Often it’s the small things that make life so interesting. None of the poems is ‘difficult’ to understand for any reader, and for those interested in looking deeper there is often much to find. For instance the poem ‘The Boar’ is about what it says, but is also about Parkinson’s disease (and perhaps other things I’ve yet to discover). And many other poems are about more than one thing and deserve repeated readings both for the meaning and often for the structure. These poems which are well crafted using various poetic forms are clearly edited to fit a specific form or worked design. As ‘Lovers in the Elephant Grass’ which comes in the form of a one sentence sonnet so designed to be read straight though in a breathless fashion as befits the subject matter. All in all an excellent collection and I can’t recommend it enough. (Along with his first full collection ‘Hide Songs’ if you can find a copy of it anywhere).
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