Roger Garfitt
From the Ridge

I wanted to write about an imaginary place that is very real, the hard place, which is where most poems come from. And I wanted to explore a possibility that I had glimpsed in the songs of Atahualpa Yupanqui, which I came to know during my time in Colombia, the possibility of creating a landscape from an emotional state and then making a journey through it.

Project Update 2006

Because I am lucky enough to work with Sue Harris on the hammered dulcimer, we have been able to develop a performing version of From the Ridge in which the dulcimer underpins and interacts with the voice, using themes drawn from Atahualpa Yupanqui's own guitar playing and from the songs of Chavela Vargas and Bola de Nieve. The music seems to draw the audience into the journey of the poem, word by word, note by note, creating an intimacy of attention that is quite unusual, and the response at venues across the country has been extremely positive. The programme, which we perform as part of an evening of Poetry & Dulcimer Music, can be booked by contacting me at r.garfitt@lineone.net

Roger Garfitt

Roger Garfitt is a poet with a particular interest in collaborating with artists and musicians. In his Selected Poems, published by Carcanet in 2000, Roger Garfitt has included extracts from his journals that give a vivid account of his time in Colombia and tell the story behind the writing of From the Ridge. In All My Holy Mountain was premiered in 1999 and is still touring, coupled with a new show, Presences of Jazz, developed with the bandleader John Williams: venues have included the Soho Jazz Festival, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, and the Wales Millennium Centre. Roger Garfitt was the 2001 Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia and is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is completing a memoir, The Horseman's Word, for Secker.    [Updated 2006]