Rae Howells | poetry & journalism



Bloom & Bones
A poetry conversation through ten colours



Jean and I have been friends for many years. We met at a poetry class and we still attend a monthly poetry group together. We saw an advert for a Hedgehog Press competition for a poetry conversation, and the colourful seed of Bloom & Bones was planted...





It was Jean's copy of The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St Clair that really got us started. It's a beautiful book that tells the history of pigments and colours in art, fashion and design. St Clair lays out ten main colours: white, yellow, orange, pink, red, purple, blue, green, brown and black. I began the conversation with a white poem, Jean responded; I replied with a yellow poem. And so it went on, a series of colourful poetic letters back and fore, sometimes across oceans as we fitted in the collaboration around our lives and holidays.


After seven very busy weeks, we edited our manuscript, sent it off, and forgot about it. It was very lovely to receive an offer of publication a few months later.



a colourful poetry collaboration



Bloom & Bones is a poetic collaboration between Swansea poets Rae Howells and Jean James, published by Hedgehog Press. It's a twenty-poem journey through a stunning multicoloured world of madness and murder, drought and loss, ladybird storms, absinthe-drinking caterpillars, Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings and a hare rising from a blackthorn tree.


It is stocked by Cover to Cover bookshop in Mumbles, or click below to buy direct from Rae.


more

"a cherry tree, in full and glorious flower, unfolding pink storm..."





"Bloom and Bones uses colour as a way into such a rich array of poetic approaches and themes. From lyric to narrative, storms to parenthood, the full spectrum of life is explored here through the spectrum of colour. More than anything, I am struck by the beautiful care with which language is treated in these poems, the distinctive voice generated by this collaboration, resulting in so many show-stopping lines and images. Just as in the title poem, ‘we turn a wrong corner and come all at once upon a cherry tree/in full, glorious, flower, an unfolding, exploding, pink storm,’ so these are poems to get lost in, found in, to be faced, again and again, by the stunning."

- Jonathan Edwards



Contact Rae



Follow Rae Howells on Twitter or Instagram