In my mental landscape, Bristol is a city of hills, not towers. Although, one local tower – the Purdown Transmitter, or BT Tower loomed large in my imagination. Not least because it looked more like some kind of alien space station, than a building that belonged at the north eastern edge of 1980s Bristol.
What if your average numbered walking guide, turned out to do much more – going beyond the basic geography to be predictive, intuitive, even psychic? If that happened, it might go something like this…
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the page-turner’s brooding sibling – what might be termed the chapter-jammer, perhaps, the leaf-stopper, the mind seizer, or more literally, the corner folder.
Human subjects are emotional, sentient creatures, who may get upset with how they look, or not want a photograph taken at all. When it comes to landscape photography, surely the situation is different? Or isn’t it? Does the place in the frame become a little thinner every time it is snapped and shared?
For a long time it didn’t have a name. It was just the lane that ran along the back of Mum and Dad’s bookshop…Eventually, I was to discover that there was a lot more to this old city route than I could possibly have imagined.
A quick word about Imposter Syndrome.
Two rants in poetic form, inspired by Liz Truss, her party and their supporters…
Three short recent poems, concerning light, heat and the potential perils of open windows. All first seen on Twitter as posts for Blackbough Poetry’s @toptweettuesday.
Another trio of poems recently shared via Black Bough poetry’s TopTweetTuesday.
This time, playing with and exploring the search for that elusive ‘perfect’ pebble, using ‘banshee’ as a verb and the seemingly absurd notion of fighting butterflies (for an extra bit of fun, try singing the first line of ‘Love on the breeze’ to the tune of The Cure’s ‘Inbetween Days’.
“Those woods on the ridge,
through the window,
if watched from a certain angle,
will roll over the roads,
untamed the suburbs,
reclaim the shape
of old maps…”
Not exactly a blog post, not exactly a poem, but it may resonate with some.
Three recent poems: Nuthak, Unearthed and The Nature Present.
There’s a painting in the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery that I can’t say I exactly liked as a child, but it fascinated me and has haunted me a little ever since.
Three poems recently shared via Black Bough Poetry’s @Toptweettuesday on Twitter.If you enjoy reading this, I also recently had some other poems published by Ink Sweat & Tears and Briefly Write – click the links to view. If you’re really, really interested, even more can be found in the Published Elsewhere page on this very…
Three short poems, recently shared on twitter through @toptweettuesday – Black Bough Poetry’s imagist focused poetry platform. Two birds, two sky-holes and a tiny galaxy of flies and light.
In which I attempt to mine the gap between what’s thought and what’s spoken, in a cider fuelled conversation about poetry.
Three poems of mine, recently shared on social media. Two began with staring up and into the sky, either directly or through a window. The other from a book and from listening to a dehumidifier – you can work out which is which…
I often find it’s the unexpected encounters, or ‘walk shocks’, that make a particular trip memorable.
That was certainly true of at least three I’ve been on this year – plodding along, looking out for particular views, famous sites, when, wham! something, usually from the more-than-human world, was suddenly present, changing the view, changing the day, changing everything.
I once tweeted a thread featuring a highly abridged adaptation of a folktale called ‘One Tree Hill’ for #FolkloreThursday, which seemed like it might make a poem. Below is my attempt to do just that, with a ballad-style version of the story. I don’t write a lot of poems with fixed rhyme schemes, but it…
A little bit of fun. I shared this recently on Twitter for Black Bough Poetry’s #TopTweetTuesday.
It is more than possible to lose yourself inside the wood. Not, of course, physically in a Hansel and Gretel way, more like released, albeit temporarily, from the cares of everyday life.
Normally I send poems out to magazines and websites, before I put them on here, hoping an editor will take them, so it’s not only me who thinks there’s something in them. With this one, I have no idea where I’d send it, or what chance it would have – perhaps it would be seen…
I was recently asked by online literary journal Mono if I’d like to write a guest post for them on finding inspiration in the mundane. Regular readers of Richly Evocative can make up their own minds about why they might ask me to do such a thing… If you’re interested in reading the resulting short…
This is a poem I shared on #TopTweetTuesday, an inclusive forum on Twitter for sharing poems every Tuesday – a lovely initiative from https://www.blackboughpoetry.com My ever-present, sleeve-tugging inner punster, almost had me call it Plainsong – but I resisted. It’s a familiar tree, though perhaps not as celebrated as some others. I actually prefer its…
It’s easy to forget sometimes that “nature” isn’t always, or only, to be found somewhere else. I was reminded of this with a visual jolt from a poppy this morning. On a road about five minutes’ walk away from mine, between the foot of the iron railings of a factory (makers of corrosion prevention and…
Richly Evocative 