Poetry Workshops & Poetry Readings:
I am happy to give workshops and readings for schools, retirement homes, WI, etc.. Please contact me to do discuss the possibilities. About my poetry:
It has been said that my poetry comprehends an entire spectrum of emotion, light and sound, holding the tragic and comic in delightful balance and sympathetically delineating the contours of my imaginative landscape.
One of the topics I have researched, and which has been the inspiration for some of my poems, is the first Zeppelin raid on England, during the First Word War, by Zeppelin L.4 on 19th January 1915, which lead to the bombing of towns and villages in Norfolk, including King's Lynn. In my collection, A Load of Mullarkey, I record the death of the first child to be killed in an air raid on this country in "Percy Goat, Died 19th January 1915":
What a very strange name to find on a bomb
And not even as old as the century was long
What a very strange way for a bomb to arrive
For a boy to be dead and not young and alive
Now all that remains is a small marble cross...
(excerpt © Hugh Mullarkey)
And in "Several Bombs Were Successfully Dropped", published in Eastern England Inspirations 1999, I expound the tragic tale of the war widow, Maud Gazeley, who was killed in the same raid:
...Imagine an airbourne dreadnought
Aloft in the still night air
Imagine the worst of predictions come true
A new engine of war and despair
The war that made the widow
Would make the widow die....
(excerpt © Hugh Mullarkey)
An example of a children's poem, "Making Waves", from Where in Life?:
Drop a pebble
in a puddle
then the mud'll
splish and splosh.
Bigger pebble
bigger puddle
bigger mess
for mum to wash....
(excerpt © Hugh Mullarkey)
More serious and reflective is "Words Worth" from Celebrations in Verse from the East, which poses an intriguing question:
...Did Shakespeare talk?
Did Shakespeare have a ready wit
In mundane conversation?
Could he feel sympathy
For those who searched for words
Without success?...
(excerpt © Hugh Mullarkey)
From All the Joys and Sorrows, a poem about poetry - "The Perpetual Palimpsest of Poetry":
Wipe the slate clean,
Start anew! Afresh!
Not merely again.
Ay there's the rub;...
(excerpt © Hugh Mullarkey)
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