Whilst Yr. 2021 waits in the wings, let’s appreciate the tremendous international coordination of health researchers and workers through 2020, and let’s treasure the carers, the neighbours, the delivery van drivers and all those who joined forces to win through these difficult times.
Here at the HoBB as 2021 approaches, we remember friends, neighbours, volunteers and the National Health Service who together, helped keep us together.
Volunteer Chris fires a mini-forge inside our Alder Forge to repair a split garden tool. Thank you Chris. We hope the socially distanced accomodation wasn’t too full of art materials and paintings.
Paul Stanley, Author First collection of poems “The Profound and the Profane” (ISBN No.: 1-899573-02-X)
Paul writes a heady mix of indulgent tease in his first published collection of poems, battling through blatant ‘Adult Poetry’ to delight the reader with his take on ‘Romantic Consumerism’.
Paul is obviously measuring life with every natural form he has. He documents a personal journey yet works as a word chef might to serve his readers emotional flavours they recognise well, albeit on a learning curve that he pens.
As a devotee of Concrete Poetry, (read Paul’s poem “Spider’s Leg”) his work often needs to appear online in ‘textual-image’ form because most default typographical settings alter the structure so important to all writers of Concrete Poetry. This again makes it harder to track down reference to his written works using search engines that don’t recognise the importance of gaps, rivers, spacing and gutter positioning through body text (A subject Paul studied at University)
Because Paul paints with words, his writings are aimed at the reader’s understanding of ‘image’ as well as tongue, regularly slicing through the set restricted ‘lines’ walked by many of the ‘now’ poets. At times when Paul needs to communicate beyond text lines, he designs, models and paints spectacular model characters – a disturbing world of Halfling, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb, Chubb, Burrows, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brockhouse, Goodbody, Hornblower and Proudfoot. My personal fav. is this giant:
Those Earthlings curious to catch up with Paul’s first published collection of poems, including ‘The Kiss’, ‘Shelf Life’, ‘The Theory of Irrelatively’ and ‘The Night I Met a True Vegetarian’, should contact Paul via theBattleforge site or cautiously approach their nearest bookseller to order a copy of ‘The Profound and the Profane’ giving them the secret code number of ISBN: 1-899573-02-X.
