A new book – and a new project! For the past couple of years I’ve been working away at a group of poems focused on the Shropshire/Powys border. As part of this, I’m working with North Shropshire-based composer Martin Bussey, and with previous collaborator, illustrator Katy Alston.

The Border Back of Beyond will be published in early 2027 by Fair Acre Press of Oswestry. It will be a companion piece to ‘Fan-peckled’, my and Katy’s book focused on Shropshire dialect words, which came out in 2021, and won the Michael Marks Award for Illustration.

The Border Back of Beyond will be a 45 minute show which immerses the audience in a multimedia experience from the border, evoking ghosts and mermaids, thieves and monsters, giants and warriors. I will perform my Border Back of Beyond poems within new music composed by Martin Bussey, against the magical backdrop of Katy Alston’s beautiful illustrations. There will be six shows in venues up and down the border during April 2027.

My poems arose from the stories belonging to particular places – including the Olde Man of Wollaston, who was 152 and – eventually – buried in Westminster Abbey; the disastrous love story of Eadric the Wild and Godda the Fair, high on the Shropshire Hills; and the murder of a Welsh bonesetter who was paid in silver buttons. Threading the show is the fate of the Welsh prince Owain Glyndŵr, who in the early 15th century took on the power of the English and lost. But there is no certain record of Glyndŵr’s death. He was never pardoned, or betrayed. He is imagined, still, to be sleeping, waking, and wandering this border.