TRIBUTES have been paid to ‘Jersey’s pre-eminent resident poet’ Linda Rose Parkes, who died earlier this month after a long illness.
Recipient of a series of prestigious national awards – Blue Nose poet of the year award, joint second in the Keats/Shelley memorial prize, winner of a Kitley Trust award and twice runner-up in the National Poetry competition – Ms Parkes had been an imposing presence on the Island’s literary scene since returning to Jersey to live in 1995.
Dominant in Island competitions – she won the Jersey Evening Post’s first creative writing competition – she was equally influential as a teacher and, in recent years, had also developed a reputation as a painter, exhibiting at the Harbour Gallery and holding a solo show at Framing and Art in New Street.
Fellow poet Constable Simon Crowcroft described her as ‘a gifted teacher who had a tremendous rapport with her students’.
‘I benefited also from her guidance in writing poetry and attended a writing group in her home,’ he said, ‘She was the pre-eminent resident Jersey poet for the past 30 years and her early death, as well as being a tragic loss for her family, has deprived us of the poems and paintings she would have gone on to create,’ he said.
Former JEP editor and co-founder of the Jersey Festival of Words Chris Bright said: ‘Linda was an eloquent and generous person who made a major contribution to literature in Jersey. As well as being an accomplished poet in her own right, she inspired and encouraged many other writers over many years.’
ArtHouse Jersey’s director, Tom Dingle, described her as ‘always positive, always encouraging, always full of ideas, always so very kind and always so much fun’. He continued: ‘Perhaps because she was so gifted with words herself, I find it hard to find the right ones to describe just how brilliant Linda was, both in her own artistic output but also as a teacher, friend and community leader. I often referred to Linda as our unofficial poet laureate; her work was insightful, tender and a wonderful commentary on the human condition.’
Ms Rose Parkes studied English and American literature at the University of East Anglia, where she remained for the influential postgraduate MA course in creative writing with novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury. She moved to Aachen in Germany and began teaching English and running literature workshops in adult education, while simultaneously beginning to publish poetry in magazines and anthologies. In 1991 she formed the experimental band Menagerie with David O’Brien, drawing together songwriters, poets and musicians to perform in cafés and on stages in Germany.
Last year she gave an interview to the Jersey Evening Post about painting during lockdown in which she spoke about the importance of creativity during the pandemic, and about the influences on her work.
‘What I’d love to achieve is a kind of flicker of movement, to capture pulse and breath, the heartbeat of things,’ she said. ‘Inspiration, for me, is about empathy, connection, a shared sense of being, both in animal and humankind. I’m fascinated by states of mind, emotions and the atmosphere engendered by these.
‘Poetry has been a part of my life since early childhood, and although the visual medium is ostensibly very different, I think the desire to create will often mean that we can move towards various media, in order to explore personal vision and the world we live in – different tools we reach towards in order to enliven the conversation in and around us.’
Over the past 16 years, she published a series of collections of her poetry: The Usher’s Torch (2006), Night Horses (2010), Familiars (2014) and This Close (2018). Her fifth, Diving for Pearls, is due to appear next month, published by Dempsey and Windle. She also co-edited with Alastair Best the anthology of Channel Islands poetry Wavelengths, and was commissioned to write the poem for the Freedom Tree sculpture at the Waterfront, carved into the granite surround and unveiled by the Queen in 2005.
