Travel Writers Online

 Europa   City   So this is city, is it?   Dug earth, its water fired to air.   Rust rocks smoothed to steel,   Shouldering elm,   And sand for eyes.                      Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa After long travels, the final arrival in the city is always worth celebrating in writing.  The Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Ruin’ in the Exeter Book here in Devon does just that; the writer unfamiliar with the great urban works of the Romans arrives in one of their British cities 300 or 400 years after they have left.  Ruin expresses the poet's understanding of the deserted urban space.  In ‘City’ from my collection Europa, I try to convey the wonder of a traveller who has never seen a European city and its buildings.  The travel writer makes sense of the scene using only the elements of nature, bricks are not in the writer’s word ho...

We encounter space but we make place.   Back in my collection of verse, Europa (2006), I first began to form this idea, prompted by poet, Yves Bonnefoy, who, incidentally, was born in Tours on the Loire in 1923.  When we travel, it is clear that unknown towns and ports offer opportunities for the relief from space, not only the undifferentiated space of the ocean but also the possibility of an encounter that will relieve the isolation of the visiting researcher.  An isolation felt even in the space of a noisy crowd.   Max Jacob - Poet in Quimper, Brittany Max Jacob makes this encounter.  His drunken sea captain is the beginning of a story that will make a place out of the space of Quimper's crowds.  Where is that coffee house?  Why does the action move to there?  A demand is set up in the literary tourist.  I am drawn to those urban European places, coffee houses.   Intention and Expectation But we embark on fieldtrip...