June Wentland

Convergence, n, the act or point of converging; the movement of eyes focusing on an object; the meeting place of eight poets.

Many forces converge in this anthology, not least the eight finalists from the Earlyworks Press Poetry Collection Competition: Andie Lewenstein, John Wilks, Eilidh Thomas, Anthony Watts, June Wentland, Mick Evans, Rata Gordon and Angela Arnold.

Walk through a wood with Andie Lewenstein, taste icicles made of sugar, brick-dust of cinnamon spice; listen with John Wilks as his  iPod plays and re-plays the  long gap of silence; watch the bubble-wrap rain with Eilidh Thomas, rescue survivors of a last willow set; mutter made-up Latin with Anthony Watts as the Magi return with their terrible gifts; plant impressionable foliage in June Wentland’s gothic-stemmed garden as it dreams of Manderley; question Plato at St Pancras with Mick Evans, discover new geometry in a corollary of bones; bring garlic and chutney to Rata Gordon, peel tiny white hairs off mandarins; meet with Angela Arnold (or almost) in a world of ifs and whens.

This anthology is the culmination of the long process of judging the 2014 Earlyworks Press Poetry Collection Competition. Five poet-adjudicators, after weeks of discussion, selected finalists, called for more poems from those authors, then selected a winner and a small group of runners-up from those.

The winner, Caron Freeborn now has a collection published by Circaidy Gregory Press (Georges Perec is my Hero, ISBN978-1-906451-65-3) but the final choice in the competition was as much about personal taste as any one set of poems being in all senses ‘better’. The poets featured in this anthology are the runners-up – poets whose potential collections came so close to being winners and whose writings, it seemed to everyone concerned, were just too good not to be published together, too outstanding not to be shared.

In this anthology we have a range of styles, themes and settings – from countryside to city, from lyric to experiment. We feel it is an intriguing, fascinating and moving selection – dip into it, read from cover to cover, read again and again and enjoy.

Convergence is also available in Paperback ISBN 978-1-910841-23-5