Fledge

Dandelion Sun A child’s sun finds a dream in young eyes.In blinks of dandelion eclipses,refracted light reflects on retinasholding warmth in ragged leavesbelow a flower standing up and out. Ryegrass and foxtail for company,a golden head of petals,swaying and slight,is there and gone and there again. The wings of friends unfold to test the airwith…

Kendal Poetry Festival … a retrospective

An Em Humble film 🙂

Countdown To The Kendal Poetry Festival …

I miss going to live poetry events: meeting friends, visiting the bookstalls, the bustle for perfect seats, listening to poets you admire while nursing a glass of wine (beer, coffee, hot chocolate etc.) and being inspired to try and improve your own stuff at the end of it all … So, in these times of…

November 1st 2020 … déjà vu, all over again

Borrowing the above phrase made famous by professional baseball player and undoubted sage Lawrence Peter ‘Yogi’ Berra, we do seem to have been here before. Back in March 2020, when news of the first coronavirus lockdown was sinking in and the UK came to a shuddering halt, I had been deep in preparations for an…

FilmPoem

The opening poem in the collection ‘Fledge‘ has been made into a film by Em Humble. ‘Dandelion Sun‘ looks at how children’s dreams and ambitions can sometimes get trampled in the process of growing up. A child holding onto their dream, who refuses to submit to the many pressures of childhood and adolescence, where conformity…

Fledge Live Launch

Film from earlier in the evening at Northern Towers with a laptop and a webcam instead of the preferred occasion (sadly cancelled/postponed, who knows?) with wine, beer, music and little bits of cheese on sticks … Video ends abruptly (one poem from the end) when the 50p runs out in the meter and the internet…

World Premiere … In Boots Like These

We’re all very excited here because in about 30 minutes, Knock and Nash Productions will air Ethan Chapples’ performance of my poem on their YouTube channel (click the picture below …). This will be at 2:00 pm (1:00 pm GMT) and I would be massively grateful if some of you would give it a like,…

The Poetry Archive

Sitting in a Semi (after David Bowie) is now up on The Poetry Archive … if you have the time, why not pop over and have a listen, maybe leave a comment and have a look at the other wonderful stuff that’s available? The Poetry Archive “is a not-for-profit organisation that produces, acquires and preserves…

Mouse

Schrödinger’s Mouse Your love of my raspberries has resulted in this late evening walk in headtorch, to hedges of hazel and blackthorn, far enough from home to foil ideas of return. Aware of owls ripping through moonlight, I kneel in damp fescue and sedge, clutching this tilt trap of quantum uncertainty; mouse or no mouse?…

Coming Home

My poem from the Handstand Press Anthology of Cumbrian Poetry which, along with Incoming, I’ll be reading at the Norman Nicholson Festival at the end of this month in Millom. Coming Home I wonder if, like me, the winter skies at Cunswick, swathed in low cloud, above old scars of crag and frozen garlands of…

Poem of the Week

So very pleased and excited that ‘Incoming’ was published as ‘Poem of the Week’ on the Yorkshire Times website, especially as it nestles among some work by folk I consider to be poetry gods (have a look to see what I mean … 🙂 ) Incoming I am not your enemy dear messenger, but still…

Is that the time already?

Good grief, we’re half-way through September; this soapbox go-cart careers uncontrollably toward the cliff edge of oblivion, while the steering wheel comes off in my hands and I begin to regret that I didn’t incorporate a brake as a design feature. Ah well … At least Kendal Poetry Festival was good. I enjoyed listening to…