Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere had its Northern Irish launch on Saturday 18th June at Belfast Book Festival.

The technical team at the Crescent Arts Centre prevented covid from doing its worst by facilitating Csilla Toldy (who’d tested positive that morning) to join us via zoom. We missed Viviana Fiorentino who wasn’t well enough to appear.

A key feature of this poetry collection is that four poets, two living in N Ireland and two living in Wales, wrote a poem each with me and my mentor for the collection, Glen Wilson contributed a poem of his own. The bulk of the collection is my work.

I was very pleased that the eminent, British-Hungarian poet, George Szirtes has written of the collection:

“Sanctuary is primarily physical but it is more than that. It offers a spiritual place of safety too. It is a token of generosity from the giver and a source of inner comfort for the receiver. Beyond that, the experience depends on much else in the long run but that first act is invaluable and restorative.

“In this book, the poet Angela Graham has generously invited Italian-born poet and novelist, Viviana Fiorentino; the Welsh writer, Phil Cope; the Hungarian- born poet and translator Csilla Toldy; Irish poet Glen Wilson; and an Iranian poet living in Wales to offer a poem each on the theme of Sanctuary.

The collection is full of moving, serious poems and individual voices. This too is sanctuary.”

That is exactly what I was aiming for: a book that would embody, to some degree, the hosting aspect of sanctuary.

But sanctuary has many facets: the environment, the spiritual, the body and the self, the goal of some migration, the refuge of those in peril…

These themes are explored in the collection.

In the launch some of the other talents of the contributing poets came to the fore.

Glen Wilson composed and performed a song prompted by the collection: There Must Be Somewhere; Phil Cope illustrated his reading of his poem with his own fine photographs; we saw a film by Csilla and Viviana on their  experience of coming to live in Northern Ireland from, respectively, Italy and Hungary.

I loved the fact that the audience joined in near the end. They had been invited to add a leaf to the ‘Sanctuary Tree’. Just as, near holy wells and sacred sites, a tree is sometimes held to be a special means of communication with something beyond the ordinary, so we had a tree to which people added their aspiraitons, hopes, prayers. Some of the audience read out their leaf message. This underlined our common  being in the world.

And we heard an experience that had taken place on the bus en route to the venue – of encountering anti-immigrant feeling and summoning instead a sanctuary mindset, a refusal to let ht enegative dominate. This stressed how sanctuary can be experienced in the everyday. How we can each be a sanctuary.

The poets shared their poems and the audience shared something of their own lives. The leaves on the tree burgeoned.

Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere is available from Seren Books,

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SANCTUARY: There Must Be Somewhere

I’m delighted that this 48-page pamphlet of poetry will be published by Seren Books on the 11th April 2022.

Phil Cope, Viviana Fiorentino, ‘Moon’ and Csilla Toldy worked with me to write a poem each on the theme. Glen Wilson was my mentor and contributes a poem.

Sanctuary is – urgent. The pandemic has made people crave it; political crises and war are denying it to millions; the earth is no longer our haven. This theme has enormous traction at a time of existential fear − especially among the young − that nowhere is safe. Even our minds and our bodies are not refuges we can rely on. Truth itself is on shaky ground.

This pamphlet of 31 poems addresses these critical situations from the inside. How we can save the earth, ourselves and others? How valid is the concept of a ‘holy’ place these days? Are any values still sacrosanct? We all deserve peace and security, but can these be achieved without exploitation?

Belfast-born Angela Graham divides her time between Wales and Northern Ireland. She has designed this collection to embody the hosting, welcoming aspect of Sanctuary. Alongside her own poems she invited four other poets,  two from Wales and two from Northern Ireland, to work with her in writing a poem each.

‘Moon’ is the pseudonym for an Iranian poet now living in Wales. Writer and photographer, Phil Cope from the Garw Valley in Glamorgan is an expert on the holy wells and shrines of the British Isles. In Northern Ireland, poet and novelist, Viviana Fiorentino is an economic migrant from Italy who works with migrants and prisoners of conscience; film maker and poet, Csilla Toldy fled communist Hungary for a ‘free’ life in the West. The fifth poet, Glen Wilson (winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing), acted as mentor for Angela’s work and contributes a poem on migration.

Angela Graham is a distinguished producer for TV. She was Development Producer on the BBC series The Story of Wales presented by Huw Edwards (2 BAFTA Cymru Awards). She was producer and co-writer of the Oscar entrant cinema feature Branwen (6 BAFTA Cymru nominations and Best Film at the Celtic Media Festival). Her short story collection A City Burning (Seren 2020) was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her poems have been published widely in journals such as The North, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House; and often anthologised, most recently in Local Wonders (Dedalus Press),  Words From The Brink and A470 (Arachne Press) and Washing Windows Too (Arlen House).

Angela says: “Before this work I thought of Sanctuary as a place but now I understand it’s something I have to be.”

Poetry 9781781726785  £6.00pbk Seren Books