Poet sings Cumbria's praises in Italy

11:09am Tuesday 18th December 2007

SOUTH Cumbria Poet Laureate 2007 Maggie Norton (pictured) has been flying the county's flag over in Italy at the seventh International Poetry on the Lake Festival, at Orta, by Lake Orta, near Lake Maggiore, under the Dolomites.

The tranquil mountainous setting attracts the poetic from Italy, Germany, USA and Spain, and the British contingent included Carol Ann Duffy, John Hartley Williams, from Grasmere's Wordsworth Trust, Christopher North and Mario Petrucci.

Funded by the Arts Council England, Maggie read her work to gatherings of poets, and in a film theatre in a mountain monastery showed the DVD of her narrative poem, The Bundle on the Dresser, the story of a Cumbrian sheep farmer who wants his son to follow on the farm, and then foot-and-mouth arrives.

Maggie spoke about our region's contemporary poets and read some of the work of Chris Pilling, Meg Peacocke, Jacob Polley, Neil Curry and Josephine Dickinson.

Maggie told me that she also mentioned the many prose writers connected to our literary landscape.

Among her many duties as a wordsmith, Maggie is a Lancaster University writing tutor; she read at the first Women's Arts International Festival in Kendal; judged the Women's Institute C.W. Federation's new prose competition for the Ann Hoyle Salver; and was recently commissioned by Littoral Arts to write a poem about Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who lived in Ambleside for three years from 1945.

The Bundle on the Dresser poem was the result of Maggie's commission to work with Cumbrian farmers affected by the 2001 outbreak, and her words bear witness to their grief, despair, anger and neighbourliness, courage and resourcefulness.

Neil Currie and Penny Savage read the poem on The Bundle on the Dresser DVD alongside Maggie, interspersed with stunning images of the brooding fells and clips of items such as keep out' signs as the disease engulfs the farming community, filmed, edited and put together by Kate Whiteside.

Copies of the DVD are available from the Tinners' Rabbit Bookshop, at Ulverston.