‘Early Walkers’ A highly commended poem…

Delighted to have a poem ‘Highly Commended’ in the I Am Writing Poetry Competition. Extra special for me because it came off the back of this year’s I Am In Print Festival in Bristol. Here’s the poem… Early Walkers Two figures shimmer on the path ahead, struggling with a skittish charge, a team of walking echoes. Perhaps…

Guest Feature – Matt Gilbert

Originally posted on Patricia M Osborne:
I’m delighted to feature poet Matt Gilbert on Patricia’s Pen as he celebrates his brand new poetry collection Street Sailing published by the awesome Blackbough Poetry. Street Sailing Matt Gilbert Thank you, Patricia for inviting me into your space to talk about my debut collection, Street Sailing published by…

Street sailing into the world

Poetry, Bloody Hell – to paraphrase a dour, fantastically successful Scot (if only he’d joined Bristol City in 1986).  I am now, a published poet, with a book under my belt. Despite still having to pinch myself, this feels a huge validation. Six months ago I wrote a post concerning imposter syndrome. This one is as…

Review: Obligate Carnivore by Stuart McPherson

Broken Sleep Books, 2022. £8.99. A little like the compulsion to press a bruise, McPherson’s collection brings an irresistible tenderness together with pain. As the title suggests, beasts stalk the pages. These are not, though, charismatic, or cute, but often symbolic creatures – rough, wounded and bewildered.  Here are memories of house spiders entwined in…

Going up a hill to come back down: in search of poetic inspiration 

For a long time I didn’t write anything at all. That’s not to say I didn’t think about writing – I always went around noticing things – such as, fascinating, but fleeting casts of light, couples in the street, not obviously arguing but with faces that suggested, not all was well. A Bristol, or a London hill, its character, buildings, history. The atmosphere of a pub. A bird in a tree, an overgrown graveyard. An unassuming lane…

A thousand nameless noises

Later, up on the high downs, I hope to hear skylarks. I always enjoy the pleasing shock in the contrast between the drab brown looks of these small birds and the piping, apparently overflowing joy of their calls, as they come popping out of long grass, like a choir of demented rubber balls, springing for the stars. 

Poetic form, a confession

Welcome to the second in a series of posts on my poetry practice, as publication of my first collection – with Black Bough hoves ever closer into view. Notes on Form. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but my understanding of how a poem works, or how its construction works, in a technical sense, remains a…

Er, so I have a book of poems coming out…

I have my first poetry book coming out in spring 2023, with Black Bough Poetry.  That’s a pretty big and thrilling thing. I get excited enough about individual poems being accepted by a magazine or website, but a book? Bloody hell. It’s especially surprising to me, as I stopped writing poetry in any serious way…

The week before midwinter & Space Station Dahlia

A short poetry post, to end my blogging year with. Two short imagist poems recently shared via @toptweettuesday on Twitter. Alongside a wintry Crystal Palace Park, replete with Penge Nessy. I had planned a reading year in review, but am frantically trying to finish Middlemarch, so that’ll become post one of 2023. In the meantime,…

Norwhere Land

Norwhere Land Norwood, owns a sonic vagueness inside its name, where it’s neither wood, nor something else, an implied other option, a missing word, lost along the way.  That said, it was once wood: The Northwood, not of the NORTH of England, but north of Croydon, before you reach the Thames.  At some point, the old woods were given…

Review: rock | salt poems by Larissa Reid

The ROCK | SALT Projecthttps://www.rocksaltproject.com The 21 poems that make up this collection (for the accompanying exhibition, painter Elspeth Knight created a series of mixed media companion artworks) trace the voices and experiences of characters who may have lived along the coast of South Fife over the past 200 years.  Divided into three parts, covering…

A question of a hill

I began to wonder, what makes a hill? Did all this tarmac count? 
Fences, PRIVATE SIGNS, the houses? Were they part hill as well – landscape like the stone and grass? The buzzard overhead, was that part sky, part bird, part hill?