by Carol J Forrester

Moving Across To Substack

It has been a while since I posted anything to WordPress.

For more ten years I’ve had this blog, and as a result, there’s a lot of content squirreled away. To try and tidy things up, I’m going to be taking this site down, and starting fresh.

https://caroljforrester.substack.com/

I’ll be slowly moving across edited versions of some of the posts from here, and putting up some new content as I go regarding events I’m performing at, and new publications. (Such as Stone Tongued which comes out on the 01st March).

If anyone is still following, and wants to keep up with my poetry that will be where you can find me, or you can follow me on Instagram where I post a new poem every other day @caroljforrester.

by Carol J Forrester

Searching For Cartimandua – The Lost, Celtic Queen

Cartimandua was a first-century British Queen, crowned by inheritance, not marriage. She is almost entirely forgotten by the history books. and I stumbled onto her thanks to ‘Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics’. The episode is titled ‘Roman British Women: Claudia Severa’, and is Hayne’s attempt to make sure women are not forgotten when it comes to ancient history. The episode is twenty-seven minutes long, and Cartimandua is not the only woman that Haynes covers before she gets to Claudia Severa and the Vindolanda Tablets. While Haynes does a brilliant job of summing up the Celtic Queen in a limited time, it was frustrating that what is known about her can be fitted into such a small segment, especially when some of that time is then taken up by the men surronding Cartimandua.

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by Carol J Forrester

Leah Atherton – A Sky The Colour of Hope – Book Review

Inspired by her solo fastpack of the South West Coast Path, ‘A Sky The Colour of Hope’ is Leah Atherton’s commanding debut collection, published by Verve Poetry Press in July 2020. It boasts an array of powerfully wild and striking poems, drawing the reader through the poet’s journey of grief after the loss of her father. Atherton sets the tone for the collection perfectly in her dedication when she says “For Papa — I think I understand now” and questions what it means to find yourself when the world around you seems determined to shape you to its own design.

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by Carol J Forrester

Why Is Confessional Poetry Important? Partly Because, It’s A Record Of The Female Experience In A Scale Previously Unseen

Trigger warning: this post mentions harassment and assault.

According to the Poetry Foundation, the term ‘Confessional Poetry’ came into use in 1959. “Confessional poets wrote in direct, colloquial speech rhythms and used images that reflected intense psychological experiences, often culled from childhood or battles with mental illness or breakdown. They tended to utilize sequences, emphasizing connections between poems. They grounded their work in actual events, referred to real persons, and refused any metaphorical transformation of intimate details into universal symbols.” [Confessional Poetry, National Poetry Foundation]. 

Take for instance the poet Isabella Dorta. With around one million followers on TikTok, she is a successful poet who openly calls herself a confessional poet. Her poetry is inspired by past relationships, and personal experiences. Her poetry creates an instant connection with audiences because often she is talking about shared experiences: love, heartbreak, betrayal, and jealousy, which are universal emotions. 

A lot of us have written love poems at some point or another.

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Vintage sketch of a witch on her broomstick, with a black cat riding behind her.
by Carol J Forrester

Shropshire Women, Witches, And Myths – Writing Poems For Stone Tongued

When I started writing my second collection, I thought I was writing a pamphlet of poems about Shropshire folklore, and the way that water weaves through so much of it. That assumption made sense at the time, as the idea stemmed from my poem ‘Trickle Down’, but as I kept writing, different pieces of history and myth started to work their way into the manuscript. I realised I was working on something bigger than a pamphlet, and Shropshire was only part of the puzzle. The pamphlet that I’d been calling ‘Water, Witches, and Women’ started to become ‘Stone Tongued’.

The collection isn’t finished, but since it’s International Women’s History Month, I wanted to to talk about some of the Shropshire women (and women linked with Shropshire) that have inspired poems. The collection pulls from history and myth, so in places the line between those two gets a little blurred. There are stories I couldn’t have included if I was writing a traditional history, because I cannot reference the source material. Writing poems about these poem allows me to focus on finding their voices, rather than double checking my footnotes.

In this post I’m going to be going voice to five women (ten if you count carefully). Kathryn Garner who was tried for witchcraft, Placida who was a Roman woman living in Britain, Mary Jones who was a resident in the Oswestry House of Industry, Hafren an ancient British princess, and Ginny Greenteeth the water hag. I will hand you over to them:

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