A writing week on poetry and place, with tuition from Jonathan Edwards and guest reading from Imtiaz Dharker

‘Places we love exist only through us’ – Ivan V Lalic

Many great poems spring from a sense of place. This is true in an obvious way: poems of landscape in which wind rushes across a hillside, poems in which the reflection of lights is caught in a river running through a city. But if you start with place a poem can go anywhere; the subject opens out in all sorts of directions. There are the poems for characters who inhabit a place, their lives and their secrets, their crimes and their loves. There are the poems of history, the way a field or a room stores all that’s happened in it, sometimes centuries before: the marriages and affairs, the gossip and the riots.

Places have their non-human inhabitants, too, and the flora and fauna, the distinctive butterflies and rabbits and squirrels and birds, make for great poems. And then there are the voices: the specific lilt of people in a place, the dialect and slang, the way we relate to each other and name the things about us. This is before, of course, we give places themselves a voice, let them speak and tell us what they know, which poems can do wonderfully.

On this week in Garsdale – one of the most beautiful places of all – there’ll be time to stretch out and explore all the ways places can make poems, just as all those special places make us.