‘Places we love exist only through us’ – Ivan V Lalic
Many great poems spring from a sense of place. This is true in an obvious way: poems of landscape in which wind rushes across a hillside, poems in which the reflection of lights is caught in a river running through a city. But if you start with place a poem can go anywhere; the subject opens out in all sorts of directions. There are the poems for characters who inhabit a place, their lives and their secrets, their crimes and their loves. There are the poems of history, the way a field or a room stores all that’s happened in it, sometimes centuries before: the marriages and affairs, the gossip and the riots.
Places have their non-human inhabitants, too, and the flora and fauna, the distinctive butterflies and rabbits and squirrels and birds, make for great poems. And then there are the voices: the specific lilt of people in a place, the dialect and slang, the way we relate to each other and name the things about us. This is before, of course, we give places themselves a voice, let them speak and tell us what they know, which poems can do wonderfully.
On this week in Garsdale – one of the most beautiful places of all – there’ll be time to stretch out and explore all the ways places can make poems, just as all those special places make us.
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Tutor: Jonathan Edwards – Poet Jonathan Edwards’s first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. His poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2019, and he has received prizes in the Ledbury Festival International Poetry Competition, the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. He has read his poems on BBC radio and television and at festivals around the world, recorded them for the Poetry Archive and led workshops in schools, universities and prisons. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales.
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Guest, Wednesday evening: Imtiaz Dharker – poet, artist and video film-maker Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. She received the Cholmondeley Award and an Honorary Doctorate from SOAS, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she became the Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her collections include Purdah (Oxford University Press), Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table (all published by Penguin India and Bloodaxe Books UK), Leaving Fingerprints, Over the Moon, Luck is the Hook and her latest, Shadow Reader (May 2024, Bloodaxe Books UK). Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than 36,000 students a year. She has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library, worked on a series of poems based on the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral as well as projects across art forms in Leeds, Newcastle and Hull. The inaugural Poet of the Fair at London Book Fair, her poems have been broadcast widely on BBC Radio 3 and 4 as well as the BBC World Service. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, New York and Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children. |
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| PRICES |
Fee includes all day and evening tutored workshop sessions, individual tutorials, tutor and guest readings, accommodation, inc. sheets and towels and all meals (not including alcohol). Single – En-suite room £1,115 |
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| TO BOOK |
£200 deposit payable on booking by bank transfer, PayPal or cheque, to secure place. Balance due six weeks before the start of the course. Please see Terms and Conditions. |
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| STRUCTURE OF THE WEEK | See Structure of the Week (tab above) | |||||
| WHAT TO BRING |
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| START TIME |
Please arrive between 3:00pm and 4:30pm on Monday 24th March 2025 Tea, cake and housekeeping information 4.30pm Introductory Workshop 5.30 – 6.30pm Dinner 7.00pm |
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| END TIME |
After breakfast, 10:00am on Saturday 29th March 2025 |
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| LOCATION | The Garsdale Retreat, Clough View, Garsdale Head, Sedbergh, Cumbria LA10 5PW Nearest railway station: Garsdale, on the Leeds – Carlisle line. For directions, see Find Us section on the Contact page. |
All courses start on Monday afternoon.
Arrival time 3.00 – 4.00pm.
4.30pm: Housekeeping/Course information with tea and cake
5.30 – 6.30pm: Introductory workshop
7.00pm: Dinner
All courses end after breakfast on Saturday (10.00am).
Course Structure Tuesday – Friday
8.00 – 9.00am: Breakfast
9.30 – 11.00am: First workshop – Participants explore particular aspects of poetry and take part in writing exercises to further their understanding and expertise. All participants have opportunities to share their work with the tutor and fellow writers in a safe, supportive and nurturing environment in which individual work is respected and confidence developed.
11.00 – 11.30am: Coffee break
11.30am – 1.00pm: Second workshop
1.00pm Lunch. After lunch, participants are free to do whatever they like, such as: relax, go for walks, read or work on individual writing projects.
4.30pm: Tea and cake
5.30 – 6.30pm: Third workshop
7.00pm: Dinner
All participants on a course have one individual tutorial of 30 minutes with the tutor in the course of the week. These will take place in the afternoons.
Each evening, at 8.30pm, there is an after-dinner event:
Tuesday – the tutor will read from their work.
Wednesday – reading from a guest writer.
Thursday – poetry/music performance from Hamish and Rebecca.
Friday – a shared reading of the ‘work-in-progress’ anthology produced during the week.
