the word hoard

the edge of light
Dianne Darby

Dianne’s poem is a surreal, edgy, flowing exploration of the danger that people imagine in forests at night. Part fairy tale, part spell, part overture to an event the poem does not disclose, the edge of light leads the reader to a border both of understanding and mystery. The poem was originally written as part of a group text entitled a nocturnal opera, another section of which has been published by Word Hoard member Eleanor Rees in her Salt collection Andraste’s Hair.

ISBN 978-1-899114-56-6 (poem 16pp saddle stitched)
£3 including postage 

 

 

letter from home
Keith Jafrate

Keith’s letter from home was written not long after he had completed a collaboration with choreographer Charlotte Vincent, and the poem shows the effect of being up close to dancers, using a kind of typographical and rhythmic dance across its pages to convey the movements of wind and weather through his garden. The poem images the garden as a kind of hiding place for things that can’t survive on asphalt, where vast slow forces travel outside human time, and where momentary, delicate events come into being and vanish.

ISBN 978-1-899114-55-9 (poem 20pp saddle stitched)
£3.50 including postage

 

 

buy both pamphlets for £5.50 including postage

 

 

a year on the ice
orfeo 5

Though the group first performed in 2002, after a long series of line-up changes orfeo 5 finally released their first CD in 2009. a year on the ice combines influences from, among many, Jon Hassell, Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and Nils Petter Molvær in music that is romantic and narrative and mysterious all at once. Without setting out to do so, Shaun and Keith have created something that stays close to jazz while drawing on all sorts of other musics. All the tracks are improvisations recorded live at The Word Hoard, and the CD as a whole is a powerful and absorbing journey, somehow ambient and passionate at the same time.

“Orfeo 5 have created an album that has haunted my seedee player this last month. You can hear their influences (especially that of Parker) but not in any way that’s distracting or demeaning to either party. Jafrate’s saxophone alternates between atonality and lyricism with sublime ease and Blezard’s noises can be both unobtrusive and leading depending on the particular compositions…..Both players interlink almost seamlessly…..a mighty fine melding of breath, circuitry and oodles of ideas. Recommended.” Ian Holloway, Wonderful Wooden Reasons

WHCD003
Shaun Blezard: electronics
Keith Jafrate: saxophones
£7.50 including postage

 

 

when bill danced the war
Sarah Murphy

The fruit of a collaboration between Canadian writer & activist Sarah Murphy and orfeo 5, and recorded on September 11th 2007, when bill danced the war runs for just under an hour. It is a powerful hybrid of spoken word, jazz, improv and sound-art. Musicians Shaun Blezard and Keith Jafrate have responded to Sarah’s fierce anti-war story by creating an intense sound world that mixes radio, pow wow drums, loops, effects, samples and saxophones, to surround Sarah’s vital text, which concerns the horrors witnessed by her Choctaw father Bill, a sailor who was involved in 3 American wars. This collaboration was part of Sarah’s Arts Council England Fellowship at The Word Hoard in 2007 and was part-funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Plus the booklet is a work of art in itself, containing the full text of the story, interwoven with photographs from Bill’s archive, as well as some of Sarah’s.

WHCD002
Sarah Murphy: voice, text
Shaun Blezard: laptop, processing
Keith Jafrate: tenor & alto saxophones, percussion
£7.50 including postage

 

 

Joy of the forest
15 authors

Consisting of 2 CDS, this is the story of a kidnapping and murder that could itself be a fiction, a record of a nervous breakdown that may be a dream, a fable about a strange world inhabited by unicorns and feathered boys that might actually be true. Joy of the forest is a beautiful adventure in language, a mesmerising spoken word recording that happens in its own haunting, mysterious soundworld.

Written over one year at The Word Hoard, Joy of the forest is a collaborative story by Matt Black, Celena Bretton, Anne Caldwell, Dianne Darby, Glynis Charlton, Anthony Cropper, Reg Czudek, Robert Furze, Keith Jafrate, Kath Jones, Mary Males, Eleanor Rees, Stuart Rushworth, Liz Tolan & Polly Williams, set in a soundworld created by Keith Jafrate from field recordings and found sounds collected by the writers, as well as their own voices. The narrators are Kath Jones & Matt Black. The booklet contains the full text of the story.

WHCD001
£7.50 including postage

 

 

 

die tinkerbell die
Sarah Murphy

Winner of the 2003 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction at the Alberta Book Awards.
In her first book published in Britain, Sarah Murphy explores the dangerous borderline between truth and fiction, memory and invention, to find a way of telling that can do justice to the enormity of everyday life. these writings are also scripts for performance, and they carry the urgency of a secret revealed for the first time. Consisting of 9 linked stories, interleaved with Sarah’s strange, compelling images created especially for the book, die tinkerbell die is an exceptional collection, unlike any fiction currently published in Britain.

“Without pandering to or becoming a part of the victim culture, Sarah Murphy tells the story of her protagonist’s tormented life in riveting, concise narratives. As bold, lyrical and thought out as a performance piece die tinkerbell die manages to also have the intimate feel of the diary of someone writing like she needs to empty her mind and heart before she loses them both…..Her stories are painful and stunning in their honesty. I don’t want to list the myriad of topics that are touched upon and written about with more eloquence than most mainstream writers have been able to muster, but I will say that the small portion that concerns September 11th re-humanized an event that, for me, had been co-opted by so many organizations and political groups as to drain the meaning from the lives that were lost. Also, despite the darkest corners of the experiences that we are privy to, there still comes across a sense of appreciation for the good that was there (the rare times that it was). Never self-pitying or self-congratulatory the narrator tells each story with a sense of humor and a quiet appreciation for having lived to tell the tale…..a fine piece of writing.”
Deborah Staab in 3am Magazine

ISBN 978-1-899114-80-1 (stories 84pp perfect bound)
£7 including postage

 

 

Feeding Fire
Eleanor Rees

Eleanor Rees writes poems that you might expect Harrison Birtwhistle to set to music. Her Feeding Fire has a delicate, off-kilter feel that can suddenly flame into a passionate declaration or a piercing insight. These are poems commited to the here and now that reveal it to be a dense, haunted place, full of unsolved memories and unrequited desires. Eleanor Rees is above all a lyrical poet, connecting ideas through an intuitive music. Her work deals with the emotions and forces that fuel reality, in poems that make a kind of complex, graceful balancing act out of instinct and bewilderment. Eleanor received an Eric Gregory Award for Feeding Fire in 2002.
 
 

(poems 48pp perfect bound)
£5 including postage

 

 

Perfect Legs
Dianne Darby

“It’s a really great book….I do admire the sense of necessity behind the poems, their intensity….such a good ear and eye for all the details.” Lee Harwood

ISBN 978-1-899114-06-1 (poems and stories 44pp perfect bound)
£4 including postage