Every Shade of Blue

Published by Kairos Press
ISBN 978 0 9927233 30

John Renbourn was one of the original members of Pentangle, the innovative folk group formed in the late 1960s. After the group split up John continued touring, composing, recording and teaching right up until March 2015, when he was on tour with the legendary Wizz Jones.

In the mid-1990s, poet and travel writer Morelle Smith accompanied John Renbourn in his journeys across the USA and Europe, from the pale blue skies over San Francisco to the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

Written in planes, ferries, cafes and hotel rooms,Every Shade of Blue describes their travels together.

Review by Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland:
https://keeppoemsalivereviews.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/light-and-music-illustration-and-texts/

‘An outstanding book by poet and travel writer Morelle Smith, whose every book is both poetic and different. This one is to my mind her best. The book is in memory of her close companion John Renbourn the musician, with whom she travelled to gigs throughout Scotland, England, Europe and America. Earlier in 2015, John died suddenly, and in this book published at the end of that year, Morelle puts together a number of travel notes and essays which must have been already part written, creating a coherent spiritual memoir of the life of two artists, in words, in music, in appreciation of visual beauty and painting, and a world seen as a background to their artistic experiences.

Simple driving, travel and hotel adventures are interspersed with philosophical and spiritual digressions and essays, all blending into the narrative and stemming from it. Morelle and John sitting at either end of a long table in a castle in France, he composing music and she writing. An incident on a Northumberland beach when car keys were lost against falling darkness and an incoming tide. They were found, and John was the right person to have lost them with and found them with, because he would have laughed, he would have known what to do, and because he laughed too when they were found. A sudden confession of her diverse, largely feminist literary influences, “the last writer I read and really liked” then detailing Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann, Anais Nin, Janet Frame, but also she says, she could “squeeze in” Camus, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Herman Hesse, Neil Gunn, Henry Miller, and, well, others. Scattered through the book, many snapshot photos of John, and a few of Morelle’s own poems in context.

I love a book that goes its own way and refuses to follow convention. It is much more likely thus to have real structure and freshness, immediacy and literary value, and this is one of these books.’