Blog and news

I recently appeared as a guest on Jo Durrant's Beautiful Universe podcast, an award-winning arts and science podcast hosted by independent broadcaster Jo Durrant. Listen again to hear me chatting about the Forest, quantum mechanics, and the places where poems come from.

I was recently invited to read a set of poems in-person at the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival, and for this I decided to learn the whole set and perform it from memory. Barring one or two missed lines, it worked out pretty well. I’ve performed like this once or two before (more commonly with individual poems). A lot of people from the audience came up to me to talk about it afterwards, so I wanted to share my thoughts, reflections, and the implications of what happens to your poems when you learn them.

London Grip have recently published a review by Mat Riches of my book Earthworks.

in Earthworks Stewart Carswell has woven that history together with enough of the personal and the political to make a deeper impact.

Big thanks to Mat Riches for taking the time to write an insightful and informative reivew, and thank you to London Grip for publishing it.

It's great to be included in this new anthology from Reading the Forest on 500 years of Forest of Dean writing.

The Reading the Forest is a HLF project to record, capture, and preserve the literary heritage of the Forest of Dean - writing by people from the Forest, and by other writing about the Forest, from the medieval period right up to the present. Alongside big names such as Dennis Potter, William Gilpin, and Winifred Foley are lesser-known names such as Catherine Drew, and modern writers such as Sarah Franklin and Andrew Taylor.

My debut poetry collection Earthworks is now available. The poems in the book are about connecting with historical landscapes to learn how to live, and draw on locations and historical sites in the West Country, such as the West Kennett long barrow in Wiltshire, Offa’s Dyke in Gloucestershire, and the industrial heritage of the Forest of Dean.

The recording from the launch is now available to watch again on Youtube.

My debut collection Earthworks is out soon 15th October 2021. You can pre-order it now ahead of the launch party on 26th October.

I've recently had some poems featured on iamb: part library of poets, part quarterly journal, iamb is where established and emerging talents are showcased side by side. Not just their words, but their readings of them.

Hear me reading three poems. Big thanks to Mark Antony Owen for putting this all together.

Over the summer, the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail have been running the Observatories project. Inspired by a recently decommissioned sculpture (or a sculpture "reclaimed by the Forest") called Observatory, Observatories invited members of the public to submit photos of their favourite views in the Forest of Dean and Wye Valley.

I'm delighted to announce that my debut collection will be published next year by Indigo Dreams. Titled "Earthworks", the book explores the connection between human relationships and British landscapes, and how these are influenced by a greater backdrop of history and politics.  It features poems that I have been working over the last 5 years since Knots and branches came out including Silver turn, plus some older material.

Forest of Dean, Autumn 2018

The Forest of Dean occupies the hills in Gloucestershire between the River Severn and the River Wye—”a heart-shaped place between two rivers,” as Dennis Potter described it.

I visited the Forest recently for a few days. We arrived at Symonds Yat in the late afternoon, with the sunlight tilting into the Wye valley. We left via Littledean, situated on a hill overlooking the River Severn, on the other side of the Forest. And the two rivers couldn’t’ve been more different.