Back in the early 1990s, the Fife Library service launched a competition. Entrants were invited to create a limerick celebrating any local place name. Helena Nelson had always liked limericks. Over the next six weeks, she submitted thirty or forty entries (there was no limit), some of them cheeky, others naughty, and some extremely polite. None of them won the competition. But never mind. The seed was sown . . .
Decades later, some of those limericks have matured into a pocket-sized booklet of whimsical rhymes, a fanfare for the towns and villages of Fife, Scotland. It is a bit of fun, suitable for young and old, with a few footnote facts about the places it celebrates.
Here, for example is East Wemyss. (You’ll gather how to pronounce the name because the rhymes make it plain.)
“The light on the beach at East Wemyss,”
said an artist, “is gorgeous. It seems
to grow more divine
with each bottle of wine
and after two bottles, it steams.”
 | Helena NelsonHelena Nelson set up HappenStance Press in 2005 as an independent small press, specialising in publishing poetry in pamphlet form; in 2010 it won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. The press publishes largely first-time collections by poets from the UK. In her editorial blog Helena Nelson often takes a refreshing look at the processes of poetry writing, publishing and reviewing, and she has documented the history of her small press in a series of booklets: The HappenStance Story. Helena Nelson has two book-length collections of poetry and three pamphlets of her own. Starlight on Water was a joint winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize. She also reviews for a wide range of poetry magazines, including The Dark Horse and Poetry Review. |