English River a journey down the Thames in poems & photographs
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Virginia Astley emerged as one of the UK's unique singer songwriter talents throughout a productive career covering the 1980s onwards. From her many collaborations with a variety of notable names in the music industry, through to her own solo career, she has managed to carve out her own particular style. Virginia grew up in her musical environment, with her father, a composer, writing at home throughout her childhood. She took up the piano at 6 and later the flute. As a young child she would often deviate from the notes in front of her, preferring instead to improvise! It was while she was studying at the Guildhall School of Music in London that she began to develop her own songs and play keyboards for various bands. She worked with Skids frontman, Richard Jobson and recorded with a number of artists. In 1981 she signed to the Why-Fi label, releasing A Bao A Qu. Following this she formed a band with old friends, Kate St John and Nicky Holland. Adopting the title of The Ravishing Beauties, they played Club Zoo in Liverpool and supported The Teardrops Explodes on tour. Virginia's first album, co-produced with Russell Webb, was From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, released in 1983. Throughout the 80s she recorded for both Elektra and WEA. In 1986 she worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto on her album Hope in a Darkened Heart. This led to her signing with Nippon Columbia and later recording All Shall Be Well and Had I the Heavens for them. During the 1990s she also wrote a musical based on the novel The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. Several other writing projects surfaced over the years, including a long poem based on a twenty-four hour walk and set to music, Maiden Newton Ecliptic. She also started publishing her poetry in magazines and winning prizes in poetry competitions. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland's Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. In 2017 Virginia was writer-in-residence at Thomas Hardy's Cottage, his birthplace in Dorset. She continues to perform, together with her daughter Florence on harp, regularly at Max Gate - Thomas Hardy's house in Dorchester. She is currently working on Keeping the River, a narrative non-fiction book exploring the River Thames and the lives of those who work and live on the river. Her first book-length collection, The English River: a journey down the Thames in poems and photographs is published by Bloodaxe in 2018.`Like the bends of a river, each one of Virginia Astley's austere, cleanly-made poems offers some particular pleasure: a delicate reflection, an original piece of seeing - but the true impact of this book is felt when the sequence is read in order because this book does not just record the passage of a river but the passage of a life lived honestly and fully. The emotional forces gather steadily, and the final effect is powerful as a tide.' - Kate Clanchy; `Virginia Astley's collection in celebration of the Thames is a wonderfully attentive and full-hearted response to both the river and the landscapes it winds through. She is most obviously (in this collection at least) a nature poet, but there are love poems here and poems detailing the lives of those who live on and by the water. Each poem can stand alone, can be read in or out of sequence, but the works true force comes from what they share - the patient returning to the water, its moods, its history (the history of its uses), it onwardness, which is the flow and energy of a journey and a story. I thought of Alice Oswald's poems about the Dart and the Seven. Virginia Astley's book is doing something different - more personal, less theatrical - but in its way it is equally powerful.' - Andrew Miller, novelist; `These mysterious and musical poems feel lit by skies of the early year, but what year? Time thins, Virginia Astley finds on her return to the Thames of, "my remembered landscape,/stored in my earliest self." But she comes back to replay this "quiet exchange" with place, not as a tourist but as a lock keeper, working on the river, watching, making adjustments, embedded like an undercover journalist. In this cool and watery melancholy, there is joy and love in the flow of details and an authenticity that comes from a synthesis of memory and work, a journeying downriver to a kind of freedom in a world that has survived the ages and yet barely exists at all.' - Paul Evans, nature writer; This is a beautiful book. There are many examples of poets and photographers "illustrating" each other's work. Here, where poet and photographer are one, illustration is not attempted, and poetry wins. The photographs show me the route, take me along the poet's path, share glances from source to barrier - a field of fritillaries, a little church dressed in snow, a weeping willow over water, and so on. The pictures show the way, while the poems have their own imagery, their own music, and lines that linger in the mind. A fine collection.' - Gillian Clarke