At our next Mosaic Zoom meeting, 7pm 18th November, Sue Wallace-Shaddad, Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society, will read from her new poetry collection. This will be followed by a short workshop run by Sheena. Please find the details below. We hope that you can join us for this meeting on the theme of ‘place’ which should be both interesting and inspiring.
Reading and Q&A from Sue Wallace-Shaddad
From Sue – “I would be delighted if you could come to my Zoom reading, followed by Q & A, at 7pm on 18th November, to mark the publication of my short poetry collection ‘A City Waking Up’. This collection of thirty poems is about the people, language and customs of Sudan. I have been visiting Sudan for over 40 years and am married to a Sudanese academic. My book is available from Dempsey and Windle, and you can hear me read three of the poems on my wordpress site. I look forward to sharing my experiences of Sudan with you!”
Workshop on place by Sheena Clover
This short workshop led by Sheena will explore place as a subject for your writing. You will be asked to consider a place to which you have an emotional attachment but which is not your current home. Please spend a little time choosing a few objects and photographs associated with this place which you can refer to during the workshop. The intention is to give you the stimulus to create notes and drafts which can be used for your future writing.
In the beginning, we focused on Wilfred Owen, his poetry and his death on the Sambre-Oise Canal in Ors on the Western Front in November 1918. This was because we were fortunate to be invited via Art Connexions, Lille, in 2010, to the initial stages of the re-imagining of La Maison Forestiere by the British sculptor, Simon Patterson. This house where Owen and fellow soldiers from the Manchesters’ spent their last night, just outside the village of Ors, is now a celebration of the poet’s life and work. It was the inclusion of an outside performance space in the plans which inspired our thinking about commissioning a poetry project to take advantage of this in the future.
We were grateful to the Suffolk Branch of the Western Front Association for donating seed funding, Mosaic Stanza, and Poetry Wivenhoe, to whom proceeds would be donated to further community poetry activities. We began by commissioning mainly local poets to submit work on the general theme of ‘Conflict’ and we also invited interested students on the M.A. Fine Art course at Colchester Institute to choose a poem from the final selection and respond with an illustration. The resulting anthology, edited by Stephen Boyce of Winchester Poetry Festival, so too have the doves gone (Jardine Press), was published in 2014 to coincide with the outbreak of hostilities a hundred years previously.
To commemorate the ending of the War in 1918, we commissioned a further anthology on the theme of ‘Reconciliation’ from as many of the original poets as possible. Towards the Light was published in 2018 and includes translations of some of the poems into French, German and Italian, in the spirit of reconciliation. This anthology was edited by Vivien Whelpton, an expert in the poetry of the First World War, and author of the acclaimed biography, Richard Aldington, Poet, Soldier and Lover. Proceeds from the sale of Towards the Light are to be donated to Colchester Refugee Action. 
The Project was brought to a fitting conclusion at La Maison Forestiere, in the performance space, as we had originally envisaged, by a reading on November 5th from both anthologies by some of the contributing poets, with the support of the editors, as part of a Battle Honours Tour, Wilfred Owen on the Western Front. This reading followed a moving ceremony at Owen’s graveside where a bagpipe lament was played, a German bugle owned by Owen sounded the last post, and there were readings of his poems. This was broadcast live by the B.B.C. on Armistice Day.
