This coming year is all about reading. I won a scholarship to study for a masters and my plan is to use the time to read as much as I can. As readers of this blog will know I like to take photos, although I’ve been far less prolific recently; through NOT taking photos I’ve realised that photography is a big part of my creative process. I’m very much more connected to the world around me when I photograph it.

This summer I read Dostoyevsky's novella The Gambler. It's compulsive reading and was written in a month while he was writing Crime & Punishment. His publisher had got him to sign a contract handing over the rights to everything he had written or would ever write unless he delivered on time.

One of my aims with Open Notebooks is to think about how we can use the blog as a form in itself, to do something in the space that you wouldn’t do elsewhere. So the plan is to respond to a book of poetry in photographs and write about it on the blog. They won’t be traditional reviews in that I’m most interested in the emotional impact of the work and how this translates to the visual and how, in turn, this might influence my own writing.  They’ll also most likely be short.

Last month Jocelyn Page booked me to read at Lone Stars: Poetry and the American Imagination with Tamar Yoseloff and Hannah Lowe amongst others.

Hannah's biog says she's lived in Ilford, Santa Cruz ...

and Brighton.

I was excited to hear Hannah read as I’d read an article by her in The Rialto and was captivated by both her poetry and approach.

'...But this street/just links one dirty corner to another ...' from The Flowers on My Balcony in The Hitcher, Hannah Lowe (Rialto, 2011)

One of the things that caught my attention was the work which centred on her father who was Jamaican Chinese and a professional gambler. I also have a Jamaican father who has been known to like a flutter.

From Now That You Live in Hoxton. '...We were bored, I said, done with the chicken emporiums, pound shops/and chain pubs, no matter we'd fallen in love in/The Crown over pre-packed lasagne and 2-4-1 pints.'

Hannah’s work takes you to ‘dirty corners’ but there is a luminescence in its truth that makes these places magical. Even the Elephant is [almost] exotic. Her poetry is unflinching yet full of hope and light.  She writes about family, relationships, friends, love, sex, affairs. There’s a universal element to her work even though it’s very singular at the same time. It’s full of movement; she likes terza rima and it keeps the pace cracking along.

'You are reverent in the half light, splendid as a tree.' From The Picnic

These are poems that want to communicate and be understood. They made me feel like she and I live in the same city in similar yet very different ways.  I found her ability to inhabit her own, often crepuscular, landscape inspiring with its ‘dim-lit poker clubs’ and ‘the orange glint of cigarettes on balconies’. It made me want to go back to my journal and write what I feel; to say ‘so what if I’m writing ANOTHER elegy for my son’; and to meet her for a pint in The Crown.

You can read more about The Hitcher here.