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Tom Pow

Award winning Scottish poet Tom Pow discusses his richly evocative Dying Villages project as well as his various other projects, including the recent Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness.

We get the opportunity to hear a few Scottish Chastushkas, too. Tom will be bringing the project to the Library from 22nd - 24th April during a unique residency, unpacking the suitcase of poems, stories, images and sounds he has gathered while exploring the dying villages of Europe, from Spain to Russia. He will also be presenting a range of artefacts from the Dying Villages Museum.

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First published 1 April, 2010

About Tom Pow

Tom Pow Tom Pow was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Dumfries. He was poet in residence at the StAnza poetry festival in 2005. He has published several books for children, and the record of a poets' correspondence and poems, Sparks!, with Diana Hendry. Landscapes and Legacies (iynx, 2003), his fourth collection of poems, was short-listed for the Scottish Arts Council's Book of the year Award. Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness (Salt, 2007) won the poetry category in the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards 2009, in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council. His latest book is In The Becoming: New and Selected Poems (Polygon 2009).

In 2007, he was given a Creative Scotland Award for a project concerning dying villages in Europe. He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, Dumfries; lectures for Lancaster University on its Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing; and is a registered member of the Scottish Storytelling Network.

Tom Pow's website

About Dying Villages

Goat. Image by Tom Pow By 2030 it is estimated that Europe will have lost one third of its population. It is already an ageing population with a low birthrate. The effect of this demographic change - the greatest since the Black Death - will be felt most acutely in rural areas. In 2007, Tom received a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council for a project aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe.

In 2007 and 2008, he made trips to affected areas in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and Greece. The Dying Village website reflects these trips in sound, image, interviews and artworks.

Dying Villages is an ongoing project. Related works of poetry and prose will appear elsewhere.

Dying Villages website

We recommend...

Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness
by Tom Pow

Cambridge : Salt, 2008.

Exploring the dangerous territory of the imagination using the archive of a famous nineteenth century lunatic asylum, Pow creates powerful story-poems that question and explore divisions between sanity and madness, power and powerlessness.

SPL shelfmark: 3.Pow

In the Becoming: New and Selected Poems

In the Becoming
by Tom Pow

Edinburgh : Polygon, 2009.

The collection charts his Pow's poetical concerns: an exploration of landscape from the rainforest to the Arctic; an interest in how history and narrative shape our understanding of the present; and, in the new poems, a maturing engagement with those large themes that lie at the heart of Pow's poetry, namely love and death.