Asterisk*, Poems & Photographs from Shandy Hall

978-1-906613-33-4 (paperback, £12.95)

978-1-906613-47-1 (hardback, £18.95)

ASTERISK* is a sequence of poems inspired by Shandy Hall, the extraordinary house in Coxwold that was once home to the writer Laurence Sterne. The book is a personal interpretation of things Shandean, combined with photographs of the house and its garden.

‘The poems and photographs in this unique collection are numinous and sharp with surprise and pleasure. Paul Munden's poems provide a way of re-seeing and re-shaping spaces; of re-imagining and revising the history and inhabitants of a place; and of playing with time, image and the music of language in styles that beguile and delight. I enjoyed this book immensely. It is a gift to any reader who values attentive, playful, wide-awake art.’ — David Morley

'*(Title Poem)' with photo, as presented in Asterisk*. Click the image to enlarge.

Paul Munden was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1958. He won scholarships to the Winchester Cathedral Choir School, and to Canford. He then graduated from York University and has lived in North Yorkshire ever since.

He worked as a creative writing tutor in adult education and for various universities, before becoming Director of NAWE, the National Association of Writers in Education.

He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1987 and his poems have appeared in many anthologies, including the Faber Book of Movie Verse, Faber's Poetry Introduction 7, and Quintet (Staple First Editions 1993). For the British Council, he has been the Writer-in-Residence at several Anglo-Swiss conferences on themes including 'Ethics and Predictive Medicine' and 'The traffic in cultural artefacts from Iraq and Afghanistan', and 'The Role of Cultural Relations in Addressing Conflict'. He is the editor of Feeling the Pressure: Poetry and Science of Climate Change (British Council 2008).

Reviews

Paul Munden is the Director of NAWE, the National Association of Writers in Education, which is these days based at Shandy Hall in Coxwold. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, once lived there. Asterisk, the Centre for the Study and Development of Narrative, is also based there.

Asterisk (Smith/Doorstop, £12.95) is a series of 24 poems ‘about’ Shandy Hall, accompanied by colour photographs by Marion Frith. Borges meets Bulgakov in the Yorkshire Wolds. The library shelves are full of ‘whimsical ramblings and imaginings; / the fragments of a fiction, opinions, a life.’ In the garden ‘the grass already / inches back in a time-lapse film / that’s not so much a trick // as a metaphor for the energy / by which life continues to surprise... [you] open a book to find / nothing but the pure trimmed green / of each annihilating page.’

—Andy Croft, Morning Star