The Ballad of Shingle Street and Other East Anglian Poems
Priority booking opens Wednesday 11th May | General booking opens Monday 16th May
A performance of poetry with music with poet and novelist reading from his collection Shingle Street and other more recent poems about East Anglia. Blake’s readings are accompanied by original music composed and played by the multi-instrumentalist members of The Hosepipe Band.
Blake Morrison is a writer who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. He began his literary career as a poet, with the collections Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. He is probably best known for his memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me and his novels, including The Last Weekend and The Executor. His 2015 collection of poems Shingle Street was the inspiration for his collaboration with The Hosepipe Band. Many of the poems in the collection observe the crumbling East Anglian coastline together with its environmental, historical and human associations.
"To Orford Ness
The waves maraud,
The winds oppress,
The earth can’t help
But acquiesce
For this is east
And east means loss,
A lessening shore, receding ground,
Three feet gone last year, four feet this
Where land runs out and nothing’s sound.
Nothing lasts long on Shingle Street”
Extract from The Ballad of Shingle Street
The Hosepipe Band is an established folk band which performs at clubs, arts centres and festivals around East Anglia and beyond. They play traditional and composed music on a unusual array of instruments including: saxophone, dulcimer, bagpipes, footbass, concertina, upright bass and keyboards. The band began and still perform as a barn dance band but also play for concerts. In recent years they have composed and played original music to accompany poetry readings, firstly with the Essex poet and musician Martin Newell and latterly with poet and novelist Blake Morrison. Because members of the band come from such different backgrounds, the music they play to accompany poetry cannot be pigeonholed as belonging to any specific genre.
You can find out more about this project and listen to samples of poetry and music on this website: https://www.hosepipeband.co.uk...