Hyem

Robyn Bolam, freelance poet, editor and reviewer, was born in Newcastle, grew up in Northumberland and now lives in Hampshire. She is Emeritus Professor at St Mary’s University, a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Southampton University and RLF Lector on the Isle of Wight. In 2016-17, she led the community-based, combined arts Ferry Tales Project which was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. She has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, The Peepshow Girl (1989, as Marion Lomax), Raiding the Borders (1996, as Marion Lomax), New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Hyem (2017). She is the editor of the anthology, Eliza's Babes: Four Centuries of Women's Poetry in English (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), and of five seventeenth-century plays. In 1981 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors and won first prize in the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition. Her libretto for the opera Beyond Men and Dreams (composer Bennett Hogg) was performed by the Royal Opera House Garden Venture in 1991. She was awarded a Hawthornden International Fellowship in 1993, held a British Council writing residency at the University of Stockholm in 1998, and was Writer in Residence at the University of Reading in 2010-11. She has given readings of her poetry in Britain, Portugal, Sweden, Romania, USA and Japan.

'There is calm acceptance of mystery; there is precise observation... and carefully sustained metaphor...and in all of this, there is the poet's trust in her own perceptions, which are at once worldly and otherworldly.' - Lavinia Greenlaw & Alan Jenkins, PBS Bulletin, on New Wings; 'The new poems pulse with determined affirmation and renewal... humour and lush detail merge with...poems of unusual intelligence and historical sensitivity.' - Todd Swift, Poetry Review, on New Wings; 'Compelling and accomplished...a poet of unusual talent.' - Bernard O'Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement, on The Peepshow Girl