Unamerican

There’s a new poem below. I don’t tend to like explaining poems, but I do appreciate a bit of context. Like many others I suspect, not least in the USA itself, I feel profoundly shaken by recent events there. When I was six, I discovered Charlie Brown cartoons, encouraged by an American exchange student assistant…

In search of the remarkably mundane

This article was originally published on Mono Fiction in 2021 – sadly the magazine and site seems to be no more. The approach it outlines still applies to a lot of the posts, which appear on this blog and often my poetry. Guest blogger, Matt Gilbert talks about finding writing inspiration in the seemingly mundane……

Three new poems: Brussels to Bruges, Political Donations, No Smoke

Three new poems, recently shared on Twitter as part of Black Bough Poetry’s #toptweettuesday Brussels to Bruges  Considered through train carriage windows, agitated rooks and solitary horses twist necks to eye them. They’re everywhere. Squattingby ditch and stream, in tight organic knots – coppiced willows. Stools tracing lines across flat lands. Borders, vertical as much as horizontal. A coiled army…

Previously, on the me show

I have three new poems up on Northern Gravy, in their 12th edition. I have an unfortunate tendency to dwell for longer on rejections than acceptances when it comes to poetry. I’m trying to change that way of thinking and to celebrate the successes. I’ve tried several times in the past two or three years…

Looking for the edge of Zurich. 

Where were the bored teenagers, the drunks, shouting kids, people laughing, shouting into mobile phones? Stray cats. Lost dogs. Lost souls. In this city of banks, presumably there must be squads of stressy men and women in tight blue suits pushing through the crowds, busy busy busy? Where was the noise, the random, the edge?

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. 

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,…

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?

On foot to the UFO station

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.