Advice to the poet from a five-hour drunk

In which I attempt to mine the gap between what’s thought and what’s spoken, in a cider fuelled conversation about poetry.

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The world’s first psychic, intuitive, walking guide…

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…

Landscape

Three invitations to the unexpected

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.

Landscape / Uncategorized

Making a mountain of Solsbury Hill

For a lover of hills, this small region of the country offers quite the range: steep hills, lone hills, round hills, hills with views of the sea, hills buzzed by kestrels, or patrolled by buzzards, internationally renowned hills with ruined churches on top, hills crowned by stands of trees, hills once topped by hill-forts, hills with winds that land a flurry of blows near the summit and hills disguised as city streets, with houses and shops groaning up and down their slopes.

Landscape / London

Wandling Free?

Surrounding the wall, stubby ash and elephantine coils of Cherry Laurel gave a writhing border to the site, which, just for a moment, became an abandoned sacred grove. For some reason – the unnatural quiet perhaps – the spot felt like a Celtic ‘Thin Place’, or more accurately a broken thin place, as here it seemed, any doorway to the eternal world had been blocked by litter and forgotten.

Mindful

Not exactly a blog post, not exactly a poem, but it may resonate with some.

Nukhak, Unearthed, The Nature Present

Three recent poems: Nuthak, Unearthed and The Nature Present.

Haunted by a strange green world: ‘Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers’

There’s a painting in the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery that I can’t say I used to exactly like, but found that it haunted me in a way. Here’s a tribute and another chapter in my ongoing fascination with all things green…

Street sailing, Wall v tree, The next service is due

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…

Landmarking, Only crow and Galactic wood

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.

Dehumidefiance, This old thing? January.

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…

Three green ladies

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…

The lost cenotes of South East London

A little bit of fun. I shared this recently on Twitter for Black Bough Poetry’s #TopTweetTuesday.

Australia in a time of fire.

“We know everything there; the trees, animals, plants…It’s like a bush library for us”Djawa Timmy Burarrwanga “It’s just like a big book to us. This whole land. Now, over the years, people been taking – like tearing pages out of our book so there’s bits and pieces getting lost…”George Trevorrow “Life will cook; the seas…

Lost in the woods up the road

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.

The Keypad Thieves

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…

A blog post that may take you somewhere else

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…

London Plane

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…

Suddenly, a mini urban meadow

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…

Where we going now?

At times I’ve found the last year reminiscent of my teenage years. All those extended periods of longing for something to happen, for life to get going, to have stuff to look forward to. All combined with often intense feelings of boredom and frustration; alleviated to various degrees through reading, listening to music or simply…

Amplified voices

Every Tuesday on Twitter, poetry publisher Black Bough, run by writer and poet Matthew M C Smith, hosts an all day sharing event called Top Tweet Tuesday. Using the hashtag #toptweettuesday, poets of all ages and backgrounds, from across the globe, are invited to tweet poems they’ve written, or boost those written by others. Each…

The opposite of page-turners

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.

Please don’t call it a blogiversary: lessons from a decade of blogging

If I could travel back in time to visit the me of ten years ago, when I started writing this blog, to tell myself that he/I would still be doing it a decade later, I doubt I would have been believed. That I would be writing this anniversary piece under the shadow of a global coronavirus pandemic, as the UK entered its third national lockdown in a year, would have been a greater surprise than the fact Richly Evocative was still going – but only slightly.

At one end of the park

I like to start at the western end, off Finch Avenue. To get there, I walk over a railway bridge that looks nothing like a railway bridge, then before reaching the corner, hop up the low wall between a hawthorn and a young oak, and then like many others, cut across the desire path worn into the grass.