Strings of Pearls, A Collection of Poems

This little anthology is after my own heart, on the subject of something I would love to collect more of. I love pearls and have quite a few in various guises – a classic simple necklace, an outrageous string of deformed pearls, and the two pearls given to me by my sister which I wear in quite a risqué piercing in my upper left ear.

I can remember being in the swimming pool at a friend’s house in Spain and suddenly someone remarked that I was wearing my pearls in the water – I had great satisfaction explaining that, as they were real pearls, they should be worn as much as possible as they improve in colour and lustre!

This book looks at pearls (and other jewels like opals and diamonds) and is a joy to come back to time and again.

For over the last 30 years Bill and I have been members of a wine tasting circle, sadly now known as Mr Boozy, and 12 of us get together once a month to taste wines from around the world. We are a motley crew with two GPs, a judge, a plants woman, accountant, language teacher, beautician, computer geek, social worker and company director all part of this jolly band.

We really do know each other very well and rarely surprise each other. So, it was of great interest when Barbara McNaught revealed that she is also a finder of treasures – she announced that she and a chum had collected poems, writings and wood cut drawings all about Washing Lines!

Since that time Barbara and Janie Hextall have published four of these delightful books under the banner of Lautus Press and I have three of these for you in my Treasures. I’ll let Barbara tell you how it all came about:

“We both love poetry and belong to an informal poetry group where the host chooses the subject for the evening. I chose ‘Laundry’ and was amazed to discover that Janie shared my obsession with washing lines! We started to exchange any poems that we discovered on the laundry subject and were truly astounded by the quantity, and the quality of what we were finding; by how many well-known poets had written about washing, ironing, pegging out, and how much the poems touched on memories and emotions. The collection was so exciting that the idea of making it into a book was born. I had already started to collect wood engravings on the washing line theme, and we had great pleasure in finding more illustrations and pairing the poems and the pictures together.

“The whole process was a learning curve, but such an enjoyable one, and in the process Janie and I have become the best of friends. In fact, we didn’t want to stop, particularly since Washing Lines was an instant success and literally ran off the shelves and continues so to do this day. We just had to follow it with other collections about our shared passions. They all follow the same design with poems and black and white illustrations, mainly wood engravings. And Lautus Press? Is the past participle of the Latin verb ‘lavo- to wash’ meaning washed/clean. A nice little joke for us…”