15 | September | 2013 | awritersfountain

June 25, 2010 // By: Sam Thompson

In Five Ways to Well-being, we reviewed the empirical evidence collected by Foresight from hundreds of research studies across the world. The outcome is a set of five different kinds of daily activity that, according to the latest and best evidence available, promote well-being and help to buffer against mental health difficulties.

Connect With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. building these connections will support and enrich you every day.

Be active Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

Take notice Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Keep learning Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.

Give Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thanks someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.

For me Five – I thought of my family of 5 members, five fingers, hands, 5 Star (yes, I am that old!) And here’s something for you all to enjoy!

The adventures of yesterday continued…

I managed to make it back in time for the poetry launch AND I got a seat (which was fantastic) after all that driving. I met Paul and he introduced me to Sarah James – the poet whose book launch it was. She had arranged a perfect night with an eclectic mix of poets performing and reading.

Remembering what Jonathan had said at the network meeting about supporting each other, and because I was curious and at a book launch, I treated myself to a copy of Beyond. And enjoyed lively poetry from Claire Walker, Maggie Doyle (Worcestershire Poet Laureate 2012-2013), Jenny Hope, Polly Robinson, Heather Wastie and Oxfordshire poet Andrew Smardon.

The atmosphere inside Park’s Café was buzzing and during the interval I talked to lots of other poets.

Maggie told me that they were all celebrating with a curry at the Dilshad Restaurant later, I was invited. I had planned to eat the great food they serve at Parks especially as I had missed lunch but what an opportunity.

I wish I had photos of the massive long table of hungry poets eating, we took up the length of the place! It was great as I got to chat more to some people I had already met and met some others.

Funny how things repeat. At the network meeting there were people advertising Stanza groups, I had never heard of them. They are poetry groups, like writing groups for poets and are run by members of the poetry society, I made a mental note to search the internet for one later. Talking to Maggie she told me half the room at the launch were in the local Stanza group… guess what my next venture is? They have a new member. It will also be great to see these people again.

I went to the event alone, I needn’t have worried by the end of the night I’d met so many poets and made some new friends. It is great to surround yourself with creative people.

And explaining it better than I can some background on Sarah’s poetry collection Be[yond] and some reviews of her amazing talent for words!

Sarah’s second full-length poetry collection Be[yond] is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, July 2013.

Love & lust, betrayal & endurance, disturbance & peace, life & loss, nature & modern society, language & what lies in the shadows between lines delight and tantalise in Sarah’s latest work.

Following on from her prize-winning first collection, Be[yond] combines Sarah’s characteristic crafting and eye for detail, imagery and metaphor with a new, more probing, approach to language and poetics.

The three sections of this collection – Against Air and Water, Through the Ether and From Earth and Fire – guide readers past the beaches of Birmingham, through meditations on water, a dreamworld strangeness, mezzanine memories of France, de-familiarised cityscapes and gorse wildlands to the edges of everyday life, love and language.

In the words of other poets:

“Moving on from her very successful first collection, Sarah James shows that she is not afraid to take risks. Experimenting almost scientifically with form and language, ‘Be [yond]‘ is innovative and adventurous and at the same time accessible and enjoyable.” – Jacqui Rowe

“An inventive voice emerging out of the entwined interstices of the domestic and the relational: precisely observed, embodied, thick with language.” – Scott Thurston

“Sarah James’s background in Linguistics makes for exceptional poetry. The rhythm is beautifully handled at a phonological level, and the imagery is striking. Here, though, the imagery is not just an adornment, it is drawn from various semiotic systems to convey hidden meaning, as if each poem were a text version on Sir Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge.” – Alec Newman, Knives, Forks and Spoons Press editor