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…
Review: The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees by Briony Collins – shared as part of Black Bough Poetry’s Top Tweet Tuesday on Twitter to boost fellow poets.
Delighted to have a feature about ‘Street Sailing’ in Bristol 24/7′
Originally posted on The Wombwell Rainbow:
Matt Gilbert is a freelance copywriter, who also writes a blog at richlyevocative.net about place, books, poetry and other distractions. Originally from Bristol, he currently gets his fill of urban hills in South East London. He has had poems published by Atrium, Anthropocene, Finished Creatures and The Storms among…
My debut poetry book ‘Street Sailing’ is now out in the wild. Cover art by Ben Pearce. Published by Black Bough Poetry.
Most people, I’d imagine, who write poetry want someone else to read it. When it comes to individual poems the process is fairly straightforward, if at times frustrating. You research a suitable publication, or editor, then send them stuff. After this, the waiting. Waiting. Waiting, followed eventually by dancing, or raging, depending on the outcome. …
Part Four in my blog post series about my poetry practice: Assembling a collection
Having admitted in previous posts in this series that I don’t always know exactly what I’m doing when setting out to write a poem, I must now confess I find the art of putting a collection together even more mysterious…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Lofted above a scaggy, driftwood scattered beach,
lording over chunks of rock, a stilted steam-punk
iron torch, painted in off-white,
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…
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…
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?
Three poems recently shared on Top Tweet Tuesday. A goldfinch appears to change everything, the rattles from a mischief of magpies, perhaps, turn ominous and upstream in a city crowd.
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.
Richly Evocative 