Members of Woking Writers Circle have been putting Woking and West Byfleet on a poetry map of England and Wales. An exciting, four-month project, Places of Poetry, was launched at the beginning of June, and is open to all poets to place poems about a particular location on a digital map. It is so detailed that you can even pin a poem on a particular street. Already well over 1,000 poems have been placed on the map, according to the organisers. WWC member Greg Freeman has posted two poems – ‘The Basingstoke Canal’, which he has located in West Byfleet, and ‘A Foreign Wood’, about the former Muslim war cemetery, which is now an Islamic peace garden just outside Woking. Fellow poet Heather Cook has posted a poem called ‘Fast to Woking’, which begins: “Why must the train be fast to Woking, / carrying workers home to tea? / Why can’t it slow by Vauxhall Station / or hoot a toot at Battersea?” Greg said: “It’s lovely to see that Heather has posted one of her poems up there. I must confess that I have enthusiastically posted more than 25 of mine all over England, from Berwick to the Isles of Scilly. I would urge other poets who have written poems about a particular place to post theirs, too. The more the merrier … with such a detailed map, there is room for everyone.”
Woking Writers Circle 