I’ve just finished working on Poetry Partners, alongside Cree Valley Woodland Heritage Trust.  What Poetry Partners aimed to do was to bring together two different generations of local people to celebrate the woods.  There’s a Bigger and Better Blog about this project here.

I was brought on board by Cree Valley Woodland Heritage Trust to work with P6 of Penninghame Primary School, and with the regular visitors to Riverside Day Centre, Newton Stewart.  At first I worked with each group separately, but then I introduced them to one another and we met together to share the poems they were writing, their new impressions and their long memories of the beauties and realities of the woods in all their lives.

At the end we held a Poetry Partners Celebrate the Woods Night!   at Penninghame Primary School in early June. Bunting was made, tea and biscuits organised, and P6 welcomed in nearly 50 people – parents, grandparents, friends, other members of the Day Centre and anyone else who wanted to join in.

It was wonderful to see the warmth of the welcome that the children gave to their older visitors – and how the smiles spread as the children and their older visitors recognised each other from their previous meeting.  The children stood up with their Poetry Partners and read each other’s work aloud.

We published all the poems written by P6 children, and all the poems written by the regulars from the Day Centre in this little book.