About David
David's new poetry pamphlet, 'Bowland' is available now. Published by Big White Shed in Morecambe, and including a forward by Yvonne Reddick, and images created by four amazing photographic artists working in response to the poems. David is the author of two other collections: The Celestial Spheres, 2019, and An Essex Parish, 2015.
David won the Ginkgo AONB Prize in 2023 with 'The Bowland Sheep' and this formed the foundation of his Bowland Project, a love song to the rare and fragile beauty of landscape.
What people are saying about 'Bowland'
“The poems are carefully-observed, heartfelt moments of connection with the living world.” Yvonne Reddick, author of Burning Season.
“There’s an eerie stillness to these poems, like a first glance at moorland. But beneath their lyrical calm, they bristle with life and struggle; there’s a wind that blows through them, haunting the reader with the landscape’s past, present and future”. Katie Hale, author of The Edge of Solitude
David Canning's poems marvel with bright detail … He knows you can never really leave the contemporary world behind as you walk into wilderness and nor should you — so there is a sense of reflection and urgency here. Richard Price, author of Late Gifts
POETRY
This Month's Poem
Bowland
The Mountain Hare
One winter, as I walked out in the Trossachs,
as the bitter daylight paled and greyed
and a bald orange sun sank to the end
of its sky, in the gathering shadows of evening
I discovered her tracks on the leeward slope
of a snow-topped hill that called me upward
and into the couloir that lay beyond.
At the top I found her, the snow-white hare:
sleek and beautiful, wild and unreachable;
but for the muted drumming of my heart,
a breath-held stillness existed between us,
as, warily, she fixed me with untrusting eyes,
kept her distance enough to ensure
a clean escape if I moved too quickly.
I aimed my pen, but before I could capture her,
the curve of the sky, the rough edge of breeze,
in a snap she was gone, a ghost dissolved
into spindrift; always just out of my reach,
she moves around me still, flits between the faces
of the lonely city, melts into shadow
across a crowded street, finds hiding places
in lines unwritten or unfinished, leaps
through the cursive arc of my writing, calls me
to return to desolate hillsides, and ever I go, willingly.
BIO
David won the Ginkgo AONB Prize in 2023. He has been long listed in the National Poetry Competition, shortlisted by Bridport, Plaza, and the Keats Shelley Memorial Prize.
His writing has appeared in Places of Poetry, Magma, Wet Grain, Manchester Review, Sentinel Literary Review, UKClimbing.com, and on Channel 5, and BBC radio. David served on the judging panel for the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature in 2021 and 2022, and as the BBC Essex poet in residence from 2021 to 2022. He was awarded MBE in the King's Birthday Honours 2024 for services to innovation in knowledge and information management.
UPCOMING EVENTS - 2026-2027
Oct
21
Wordarium, 7:30pm, The Gregson Centre, Moor Lane, Lancaster, £6
13 March 2027
11-24 March 2027
'Bowland' Official Launch and Exhibition, The Storey Cafe, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster
Oct
1
Lancaster Stanza Showcase, 7pm, Gregson Centre, Moor Lane, Lancaster. FREE
'Bowland' Official launch and readings. The Storey Cafe, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster
CONTACT
Tel: | 07986 597629 | davidcanningpoetry@gmail.com
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