Accidental Emeralds ~ a first foray into publishing poetry
When I first began blogging, I used to post poems fairly often and on a number of occasions I have been asked by readers if I have a poetry book available to buy.
Well, now I do.
In some ways, it’s been a harder decision to do this than to publish the novels and stories because poetry is an even smaller market and I’ve had such limited energy due to illness, committing to producing a book of poems was something I wasn’t keen on. There’s a large file of poetry on my hard drive and collating and deciding which to choose and what order to put them in was daunting.
Then I remembered that in the dim and distant past where I was still half-heartedly trying to achieve some sort of success a more traditional route, I had entered a poetry competition that required a small themed collection. I entered and the collection didn’t win. It was the last time I entered anything; it cost £18 to enter and though all entrants were sent a little collection of the previous year’s winner, it really didn’t feel much like value for money. But the collection of twenty poems was still sitting there, untouched and unused and I decided that it would be a valuable experiment.
Accidental Emeralds is a book of poems with the theme of longing. Longing for love, longing for seasons that have passed us by, longing even for tolerance for the wild creatures we share our world and sometimes even our homes with. The title comes from a poem about spring time in an urban setting, where smashed green bottles lie like “accidental emeralds” amid fallen candy-floss coloured cherry blossom. There are only twenty poems, but for a first volume this was enough.
It’s available as a rather lovely little pamphlet/chapbook and also as a Kindle version. I shall be entering it into the Matchbook scheme so that if you buy the paperback, you will get the Kindle version either free or for a greatly reduced price. I apologise for the fact that the sample on Kindle does not show any poems; it only shows the cover, and a table of contents. Since the book is quite short, there’s no way of making a single poem show, but if you have any concerns, then do go into the poetry archive on this blog and sample my style there.
I have begun work putting together a longer collection that I hope to have ready before too long but in the meantime, I do hope a few poetry lovers might choose to buy Accidental Emeralds.
Unexpected item in the bagging area ~ oh look it’s a new book!
It’s not unusual for women at the crossroads between childbearing age and the end of that era to produce an unexpected little bundle of joy. In days gone by, I suspect it was a lot more common, even if some of those babies were those of a teenage daughter passed off as Mum’s late addition to the family.
So perhaps a book sneaking out at this time of my life is a similar thing. In this case, though, all the material was there, waiting. Waiting for me to look at it, consider it and then do something brave with it. And believe me it is brave to the point of being foolish, to put out a book of poetry on the themes of doubt and faith and all the grey hinterlands between the two, in a world that cares little for poetry of any ilk. Yet once I began, I couldn’t stop. I have had concerns that this surge in …motivation… might be a manifestation of a manic phase but so far it seems benign and controlled, so perhaps it is that the wheel of life has turned and I am rising, slowly.
Hallowed Hollow is a collection of 40 poems. If I had been canny, I might have marketed it as a book for Lent, but I’m not, so I didn’t. It might make a good non-chocolate Easter gift, though. The poems reflect my journey of doubt and faith, one that spends much of its time in the no-man’s land of being drawn by the numinous but of being repelled by dogma and by the often impossibly clubbish-ness of organised Christianity. I veer towards a panentheism that would have got me burned as a heretic or hanged as witch. They’re poems I am intensely proud of, for what that’s worth, and I am also proud of the fact that I have managed to get them off my hard drive and out into the world.
I’m not intending to release them as a Kindle version, unless by some extraordinary miracle, the print edition is wildly successful. There are reasons for this. The first is aesthetic; as a reader of poetry, I much prefer to have a paper edition. One can flip through, caressing pages, and finding poems as if by magic that speak to you that moment. Reading stolidly through, one by one, is not for me. I jump around. The second reason is that I believe that lovers of poetry tend to be collectors of it, who love to display their books and Hallowed Hollow is (in my humble opinion!) quite, quite lovely in its dove-grey cover with an image of rippling water in a holy well. The third reason is that I cannot construct a table of contents that works interactively. While Accidental Emeralds does not have such a contents page, there are only twenty poems in that collection; it’s no great hardship to scroll through the pages. Poetry does not sell well on Kindle, and it’s pretty depressing to see a volume sitting there, its rankings starting to look not so much like a telephone number as the numerical value of Pi to the nth degree.
I’ve not done a launch for this book, not because I don’t love it but because I do. It will find its readers in its own way, but I’d be very grateful for anyone getting the word out, as well as for reviews as and when folks have read it.
Links to US and UK Amazon pages below.
https://www.amazon.com/Hallowed-Hollow-Vivienne-Tuffnell/dp/1544615779/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hallowed-Hollow-Vivienne-Tuffnell/dp/1544615779/
P is for Poetry
Or possibly, predictable.
Come on, you didn’t expect me to use P for anything else, now, did you?
Sorry. This whole A-Z thing is inherently predictable, after all.
Anyway. Poetry.
I wrote my first poem (I’ve probably said before) at infants’ school, so somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8 (when I went up to junior school). My memory suggests 6 or 7 as the age; the title of the poem was Blue. It extolled the virtues of my favourite colour. There’s no copies of it anywhere, for which I am sure you are all profoundly grateful.
At school I was one of the few who enjoyed both the reading and the writing of poetry. Yet after the school days were gone, I seldom wrote any. There’s a few tucked away; angsty, angry ones from university days but I think the sheer wall of hugely brilliant poets I’d studied rather impeded the idea of actually writing anything myself. Even my fiction dried up at uni; it was not until my daughter was a baby that I started tentatively to write again properly, having spent my childhood and teens scribbling.
Why poetry? What’s the point of it, is a question I’ve heard too often. Poetry says things in ways prose cannot and will not. It’s not about flowery language but about finding a way to express something (often deep and hard to articulate) in a manner that transcends age, culture, and sometimes even language itself. The brevity of some forms is like an expert ink drawing that captures a moment so perfectly, it never needs the colour adding. The longer forms tap into our unacknowledged need for rhythm and draws us in, with repetition and with something older and more arcane than the familiar story-telling of a novel.
As a mature* adult I’ve written more poetry and have found some sense of calling in writing it. It’s been published in assorted small journals (some now extinct) and more recently in national newspapers (I’ve had some in The New European). My first collection of poetry Accidental Emeralds https://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-Emeralds-Vivienne-Tuffnell-ebook/dp/B00LM890TG/ several times reached the sweet spot of number one in Love Poetry. My second Hallowed Hollowhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Hallowed-Hollow-Vivienne-Tuffnell/dp/1544615779/ made it to four in the category Religious and Inspirational poetry. It got its first review the other day and glowing doesn’t come close to how enthused the reviewer was (proud moment!)
But stuck in the pipeline was another, longer tome. A Box of Darkness stalled at the last minute. I’d got some proof copies and then realised I’d messed up the table of contents, and couldn’t figure out how to do it properly. I’d also used a quote from American poet Mary Oliver and I realised that this was unethical. Despite the quote being all over the internet, I couldn’t use it, either inside the book or on the cover or blurb. So I had to think again. Two years on, I was still thinking. Then a couple of weeks ago, I dragged myself back to it, and did it. A recent purchase of a traditionally published book of poems gave me a clue of how to present the contents page without having to jump through hoops.
A Box of Darkness (like Hallowed Hollow) is only available as a paperback, as I don’t feel a longer collection fits digital format There’s 60+ poems in it, so at the current temporary release price of £5.00 (or local equivalent) that’s extremely good value, but it will go up very soon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Box-Darkness-poems-darkness/dp/1505904285/
Subtitled Poems from the Darkness, the theme is obvious. The blurb is as follows:
“Sometimes we fear to go into the dark places that depression and mental distress can lead us into. Yet as many mystics and seekers over the centuries have found and spoken about, those dark places often contain the treasures we did not know we were searching for. These poems are the results of my walking into the darkness and bringing back the beauty and wisdom that is hidden there. Some painful, some humorous, but all poignant, I hope you will find these poems inspire and encourage you to seek your own treasures in the darkness.”
Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking 
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