Tessitura (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781848612396)

Tessitura, Italian 'texture', borrows a musical conceptual term, denoting the textural sweep of melodic contour - kind of safe-space - for a singer or instrumentalist. This collection is intended as a corresponding writerly-space in which I bring together various drifts of work, assemble them into poetry's visual equivalence of music's soundscape. The poems are grounded - and sometimes take flight from - my comfort-zone roots in the South-West of England - its continuity of personal ancestors and especially its successive memory chain of often forgotten women writers, several of whom make their presence known in the central sequence 'Devon women; Lost W/rites'.