During the first three weeks of 2014, eighty eight poets around the world started writing a poem – some were veterans with several collections to their name, some only at the start of their careers, some were writing with English as their mother tongue, others writing it as a foreign language…all writing under the same sky with eighty eight constellations as their inspirations. Some of the poems are formal, some are freewheeling but what they all have in common is that all are rooted on earth looking up to the stars.This is the third collaborative anthology from the innovative poetry press Beautiful Dragons and, so far, the most ambitious. Previous collections – Solstice (2012) and The Witching Hour (2013) have focused on the summer solstice and Walpurgis Night respectively. Beautiful Dragons anthologies are unique collections, created in the spirit of collaboration with all poems being written, wherever the poet is in the world, at the same time.
A handful of the poets are OU Creative Writing tutors – Joanne Reardon Lloyd, Morgaine Merch Lleuad, Nessa O’Mahony and Anne Caldwell – and one of the poets was a student in creative writing at the OU, Dan Stathers. The founder of Beautiful Dragons and editor of the anthology is a former OU tutor herself, the award winning poet, Rebecca Bilkau whose first collection Weather Notes was published by Oversteps Books in 2012. The anthology was launched in Lancaster on Wednesday 30 April 2014 and will be available to buy very shortly…..