Books
How to save a river - Michael Marks Trust, 2024
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This pamphlet features a selection of 15 poems. The submission won the 2024/5 Environmental Poet of the Year Award.
"Our winner this year showed vast creativity, great play and skilled control in How to Save a River. The uncertainty of place and time in this collection, full as it is of constant movement - alongside the straightforward stoppings of grief found in Signs of life, River deep, mountain high and The current - felt a fitting tribute to the crossovers between world and individual which we all navigate.
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"These are moving and surprising poems. They lament the degradation of river habitats whilst elegising, too, the loss of a parent. We visit a fire in Cyprus, becks and rivers in the Lake District and the US. Animals of water swim through much of the pamphlet: eels, smolts, efts, crayfish, the salamander. Among this burgeoning life, the strange face of loss is never far from sight. This means that the poems achieve a lovely, multifaceted evocation of human interactions with the life of water, an element from which, finally, strength, comfort and no small degree of hope are drawn.
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"There’s a beautifully delicate translucency to the wide-ranging and powerfully arranged poems of this pamphlet. Without having to moralise or even raise their voice, these memorable poems make themselves heard." The Competition judges
Visit Wordsworth Trust website to purchase How to Save A River.
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We Lost The Birds - Nine Pens Press, 2023
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This pamphlet takes flight to survey the human landscape.
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"At times sad and strange, at others darkly funny, these poems are marked by a deft use of language, surprising conceits, an elegant music and a riot of birdlife…This is precise, inventive, well-executed work." Colin Bancroft, Nine Pens
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"There's a significance to this body of work that easily escapes its stanzas and inhabits the mind long after the pamphlet’s been closed. This is a well-rounded and impeccably presented journey through the modern world, with all the pitfalls that inevitably arise. However, it is with climate change pieces where this pamphlet really shines.
"The opening, titular poem is probably one of the strongest extinction-themed pieces I have read for some time: it takes a very smart poet to hit the right note between casual observation and impending terror and loss…The normal and the surreal are never too far away from each other…
"It’s satisfying as a writer to come across something that kills you with kindness and gentle horror once in a while." S Reeson, Internet of Words
Visit the Nine Pens website to purchase We Lost The Birds.
Botanicals - Wildfire Words, 2021
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Botanicals won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award in 2021. Its poems explore the human world through the prism of the natural.
"Grief, fatherhood, passion, isolation, meditation, memory and time are among its litterfall. Intimate, restorative, interested in detail and the commonplace, this is a poet concerned with his environment, whose verse is at times vigorous, at others delicate as our relationship with the nature." Howard Timms, Wildfire Words
"Ben Verinder is a writer of extraordinary range and talent. Startling and surprising, his work takes us in unexpected and exciting directions…Deeply moving and profoundly affecting, this is nature poetry of the highest order." Anna Saunders
"His gift is to package these old beliefs into delicately realised vignettes of modern life…Like their subjects his poems reward close attention." David Lukens
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"I enjoyed all the poems in Ben Verinder’s Botanicals, for their grounded, precise, language and a deft touch with metaphor." Angela France
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Visit the Wildfire Words website to purchase Botanicals.
I Felt Like An Adventure - Memoir Club, 2008
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The biography of adventurer, curator and writer Mary Burkett. Mary was the Director of Cumbria's Abbot Hall Gallery and founder of the award-winning Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry. Her written work included books on Kurt Schwitters, George Senhouse and William Green. She was a renowned expert on felt and feltmaking and counted Patrick O'Brian, Svetlana Alliluyeva and Percy Kelly among her friends.
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Visit the Foyles website to purchase I Felt Like An Adventure.