Poetry Launch at Central Library

Five Leaves New Poetry series, part of Nottingham Poetry Festival 2024, continues at Nottingham Central Library.

Hear from Fiona Theokritoff and Nathan Fidler, along with guest appearances from other poets in the series.

June 13th, 2024, 7pm-8.45pm

It is a fundamental law in our universe that energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed. This principle lies at the heart of Fiona Theokritoff‘s debut pamphlet, New Uses for a Wand, which follows the way our world has taken the old energy of magic and alchemy, and transformed it through inspiration, conflict and necessity into today’s energy of science and technology. The poems explore the pain as well as the inevitability of change, how our world changes, and how our global and personal relation­ships change as a result. And how humans will always struggle to love, whatever the cost.

Collecting poems with a sense of anxiety or an underlying itch – sometimes with a drop of wry humour – You Worry Too Much is the debut pamphlet of Nottingham-born poet Nathan Fidler. There are poems for people long gone, for people still here, and for tiny insects. There are poems about the strangeness of being alive, here with you. Often written last thing at night in the moments before nodding off, or after the buzz of a coffee in the morning, they acknowledge that we get these feelings sometimes, of doubt, of worry. Don’t you? There aren’t really any answers here, this isn’t a self-help pamphlet. You’ll just have to sit with that vague feeling for a while.

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Our Celery Days

In John Deane, his adventures by land and sea, by W H G Kingston, I came across the following passage:

It was French prisoner who first observed celery growing wild on rock on which Nottingham Castle stands, Alamon Francaise, and having cultivated it successfully in his own little garden, he made that pleasant edition to English tables, from that time forth common every where throughout the kingdom.

In 1704 the Duke of Marlborough had defeated the French at the battle of Blenheim. Of the captured 13,000 prisoners, a number of French officers, aristocrats and servants were taken to Nottingham. One of the men, Marshal Tallart/Marshall Tallard, was allowed to rent Newdigate House on Castle Gate. He too is cited as the man that brought the stringy foodstuff to our tables after noticing wild celery growing in the Nottingham marshes.  

Whilst celery was not a new discovery, both Francaise and Tallard are credited with making it popular cuisine in England, with others following their taste.

 

Tallard also had a taste for Nottingham women. In 1724-5, Daniel Defoe wrote of him:

They showed us the Gardens of Count Tallard, who, in his Confinement here, after having been taken Prisoner by the renowned Duke of Marlborough, at the glorious Battle of Blenheim, amused himself with making a small but beautiful Parterre, after the French Taste, which happens not to be the reigning one with us at present. ‘Tis said, likewise, that this gallant Gentleman left behind him here some living Memorandums of his great Affection and Esteem for the English Ladies.

Captain John Deane, born in Nottingham in 1679, lived a life full of adventure. He died in his 80s and is buried in the Wilford Churchyard so beloved by Henry Kirke White.