I first met Nick
Armbrister all the way back at the summer of 2009 or so at the Abbey
Inn in Oldham during a band rehearsal for my then band ‘Words and
Music’. We had been offered a good gig at a pub called the
Gardners Arms a few miles up the road from there and we were going to
do with a guitarist friend of mine, Rick (which it had to be said
didn’t work out at the Gardners for reasons I’ll talk in my book
‘Losing the thread’ another day) where I first met Nick
Armbrister who came along also to the Gardners also as well as the
Abbey where I first got chatting to him.
Where the idea for
our joint poetry series ‘Europa’ in 2013 or so I can’t actually
remember upon reflection, perhaps Nick would have more of an idea
than me but it certainly got delayed when I contracted Diabetes in
the late summer of 2011 and early versions of The End of Summer (it
went through three or four printed versions before I got it right)
contained some anti war poems which became a stable of our books, two
anti war poets protesting anyway we could in that summer of 2014. A
second book followed two years later simply Europa II where I wrote
excluding my NaPoWriMo themed work, my first major themed work on
Prisoners of War and then at the start of 2019, our third book of
this which from my side contained well over 20 pieces of Soldiers
retreating from a massacre of their men across the ocean.
As I said before
following my newly developed mini poetry form, I have now nearly my
section of our fourth poetry writing currently somewhere round 34 or
35 pieces looking at people’s lives just before and just after it
gets bombed by a enemy’s planes in the middle of a war. Following
on from both Europa2 and Europa3, Europa 4 from my side will look at the
effects of people’s lives this time in just a few lines.
The poems that may
appear in the book I suspect are going to change by the time my side
of the collection will be ready some point in the Spring or summer of
2020 but a example of this could well be:
Kissing in the
shelling
Basked
in silence
the
young couple couldn’t move
from
the shadows
once
the shelling started
their
kissing being the only thing
that
could keep them alive.
Europa
1 to 3 can be all be found on my Amazon page in the meantime
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