Milestone Poetry Competition

I was very pleased to learn the other day that a poem I’d written and then subsequently entered in a competition had been shortlisted out of something like 500 entries. Of course, the rules forbid further edits once the submit button has been pressed, but this didn’t prevent me working on it afterwards and a…

Look

Look Look closely and you’ll see I am not here. Listen to these convincing noises. Observe my empathetic nodding. Engaged without listening, I am here, and yet I am not. Behind these eyes, I am in a dusty album between old pages of black sugar paper. See how I am grey and balding, but my…

A Day At Northern Towers …

Having finished a poem about swifts, with which I am very pleased (and in which I believe I’ve borrowed the sort of extended metaphor often associated with conceits written by Elizabethan chaps like John Donne … or not, as the case may be), I’m sitting here wondering what to do with it … Options:  Sit…

Write Out Loud

This last week, I uploaded “Incoming” to my blog at Write Out Loud and was very pleasantly surprised with the interest it generated for the anthology “Curlew Calling” (edited by Karen Lloyd and available HERE). In addition, the poem was chosen as WOL’s poem of the week, which is a lovely accolade and one which…

Return To Mardale …

Excellent news from Atrium Poetry: ‘Return To Mardale’ and ‘On Good Days’ are to be published early next year. The Mardale poem came about as a result of a ‘Drowned Villages’ poetry competition in three regions (Wales, Cumbria and Scotland) where villages in the early part of the twentieth century suffered the same fate, i.e….

If I Wanted To

If I wanted to remember you, I wouldn’t use this picture; faded and mildewed through years of neglect. If I wanted to find you, I wouldn’t start from this place; confused by thirty years of one way streets and dead ends. If I wanted to walk to where you are, I wouldn’t want this baggage;…