Hannah Stone

If Hannah Stone were an actual stone she’d be a chunk of quartz; multifaceted, unpredictably coloured and sparkling. Sometimes earthy, sometimes glittering, her poetry reflects and refracts the light, and contains unexpected dark corners. Hannah forages. She collects words other people discard for being too esoteric, or have forgotten about. She collects mundane experiences like cutting the hedge and driving her kids around and transforms them into ironic or whimsical commentaries on the human condition. She purloins items of news, social media postings, error messages from the computer and re-deploys them as lenses through which to observe the world around her. She researches other cultures, other lives, other perspectives in order to make sense of her own life.

In other existences, she digs an allotment, picks fruit from her garden, scavenges firewood from skips and pauses for breath on the tops of hillsides and on misty moorlands. Her familiars are feline, but she pauses to observe spiders, snails, curlews, foxes, seals and other northern creatures. She would like to be able to watch lichen grow. The child of wartime parents, Hannah wastes nothing and along with many pieces of carefully straightened string she also has a collection of ideas and images, hopes, anxieties and sheer bewilderments into which to dip when her fountain pen is running dry. She writes in neatly labelled notebooks, and on the backs of train tickets.

Her readers find her ‘sometimes contradictory, frequently mischievous, occasionally furious, always intriguing’ (Andy Humphrey). A singer and scholar, she enjoys performing, and sharing in the glorious feast of words and sounds which is contemporary poetry.