You may also wish to listen to poem recordings that have been added to our (small but growing!) digital archive. We have poems there by:
Nadine Brummer, Daphne Gloag, Gill Horitz, Mimi Khalvati, Lottie Kramer, Gill Learner, Gill McEvoy (read by Anne Stewart), Maggie Norton, Jennie Osborne, Elizabeth Soule, Jill Townsend, Marion Tracy, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Sarah Westcott and Lynne Wycherley.
Select and listen here Poets of the Month (other dates)
Jan Bay-Petersen, a New Zealander, worked in agricultural development and lived for 20 years in Taiwan. She began writing poetry after she moved to Cambridge. She has published in several poetry journals and won the 2013 Poetry Society Stanza Poetry Competition.
The closer we live to our gods, the more we need games.
Luck isn’t random: it chooses and fondles, then flits,
while we phantom midges soar high on the breath
of the gods or are drowned in their spit.
If our buzzing offends, if we stick in their throat,
they may take as amends what we don’t want to lose,
and you pay with an arm and a leg. Let us pray.
Playing games gives a hint. They’re a rear-vision mirror
to show what is coming up close from behind.
They won’t stop the truck, but maybe you’ll pause
a significant tick while you’re sending a text
so your paths don’t collide. If you’re ten over par,
if your darts hit the wire – give the blind date a miss.
Don’t ask for a raise, not today. Catch the bus.
Wait till you throw double six, till your horse
gallops home, till the ball draws a line
from your boot to the goal, till the Queen, King and Knave
join the cloverleaf Ace. Though you can’t read the stars
you can tip them like Braille and the rhythms are good,
your sails belly and fill, the duck’s entrails are pink.
There’s a cat and he’s black and you’re blessed. Take the trick.
Poem published in The North, 50
Jan Bay-Petersen at poetry p f
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Clair Chilvers’s poems have been published in online and print journals, and anthologies. She has published two collections: Out the Darkness (Frosted Fire, 2021) and Island (Impspired Press, 2022). She lives in Gloucestershire, UK. twitter: @cedc13
Come with me to the island,
escape with me
from the damp English air.
We’ll rent a caique,
edge out past Agios Nikolaos
to a deserted cove,
anchor, bathe naked in the warm clear sea.
Sit on the deck under a blue tarpaulin,
lunch on rough bread, feta, ripe red tomatoes.
In the evening we’ll wander hand in hand to the village –
smells of oregano and hot tarmac, perfectly blended
old men play backgammon, ouzo beside them,
beads never far from their hands.
Into Babis’s taverna,
where he presides in the kitchen
over cauldrons of bean soup, trays of moussaka.
Sit with me outside in the square
at a small wooden table, surrounded by cats.
Taramasalata, local black olives,
wine from Antipaxos, much prized,
thick coffee, sketto, a glass of kumquat liqueur.
Walk back up the hill with me,
through the olive grove by torchlight
to the cottage,
moon rise, stars perfectly clear.
Had we come in Spring, my darling,
there would be fireflies.
in collection Out of the Darkness, Frosted Fire, 2021
Publications:
Island, collection, 2022, Impspired Press, ISBN 978-1-914130-50-2
Out of the Darkness, collection, 2021, Frosted Fire, ISBN 978-1-8384357-2-1
Pilgrimage, pamphlet, 2017, ISBN 978-16909959-2-0
Featured Author in Iss 5, Impspired, also Iss 3, 4, 6, 7
Heritage, anthology, New Writing VIII. Horseplay Press, 2019
Clair Chilvers blog
Clair Chilvers at Facebook
enquiry via Second Light
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Hilary Hares lives in Farnham, Surrey. Her poems have found homes online and in print and she has an MA in Poetry from MMU. Whilst waiting for the muse, she’s slave to a demanding bird table and lives in hope of meeting the perfect dog.
All Gormley’s kin each is his own man.
The local children call one Jeff.
They drown every day.
Like gods they have no smiles.
Sometimes Titian or Hockney
will paint them a dawn and,
when the tide recedes, jellyfish land
at their feet like green glass plates.
I watch as seagulls perch on their shoulders,
mirror their gaze, ask: Why stare so hard?
But they’re not letting on, their eyes fixed
as though they can’t bear to look down.
I persist: According to Frost nothing
we’re searching for is out far or in deep?
Their silence is deeper than the sea. I make
a final bid for conversation, tell them this:
I can see what’s happening behind you.
There’s no turning back.
Winner: Write by the Sea 2018 Literary Festival Competition, 2018
Publications:
A Butterfly Lands on the Moon, sold in support of Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice Care
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Angela Kirby was born in rural Lancashire and lives in London. She has a D.Phil in Creative Writing from Sussex University, gives regular readings in the UK and abroad, and her poems have won prizes in several major competitions and are widely published.
O most excellent donkey who,
not having heard of the sleep button,
woke me three times this morning
with your ancient and execrable lament,
do you bemoan the start
of your over-burdened day
and the end of your brief night’s rest
in this unpromising patch of scrub
or do you, perhaps, grieve for me
who today must leave this incomparable islet
where there are neither cars
nor motorcycles, where nothing
very much happens, apart
from the occasional birth or marriage
and the rather more frequent deaths,
where there is little to see, just Iannis
repainting the peeling mermaid
on his taverna, and his grandmother
taking a broom to the six hollow-ribbed cats
who have stolen yet another chicken-leg,
and the three old men who,
having finished their backgammon
and the last of the ouzo, now take
the sun’s path home across the harbour
in a boat as blue as that clump of scabious
you are considering?
published in anthology, Speaking English, Five Leaves Press, 2007
Publications:
collection, The Days After Always, new and selected poems, Shoestring Press, 2015, £12, ISBN 978-1-910323-38-0
collection, A Scent of Winter, Shoestring Press, 2013, £9, ISBN 978-1-907356-67-4
collection, Dirty Work, Shoestring Press, 2008, £8.95 incl p&p, ISBN 978-1-904886-83-9
collection, Mr Irresistible, Shoestring Press, 2005, £8.95 incl p&p, ISBN 1-904886-19-1 (2008: 2nd re-print)
121 Hurlingham Road
London
SW6 3 NJ
tel: 020-7736-3965
web-pages on poetry p f
e-mail Angela Kirby
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Iris Anne Lewis is published in a variety of publications. She has featured in the Silver Branch Series of Black Bough Poetry. In 2018 she founded Wordbrew, a Cirencester-based group of poets.
Mother stitches mackerel eyes
as sequins on my bodice. They wink
dark gold in the sun.
My sisters leave their baskets
brimming full of gutted herring.
They braid my hair with seaweed.
Grandmother binds my thighs together,
strokes my silver scales. Her hands
are rough with barnacles.
Trawler men sing shanties of storm-
tossed ships and foundered boats.
There is salt in their voices.
Women lead me to the water’s edge,
show me how to dance to the surge
and suck of the waves.
They break in a bridal froth
of foam. Spindrift settles
as confetti on my shoulders.
I flip my tail,
rip through the tide,
dive deep in the ocean.
Claim the sea as my own.
Poem published in Seaborne Magazine, 2022
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Julie Sampson’s poetry is widely published and she’s been listed in various competitions. Her collections are Tessitura, It Was When It Was When It Was and Fivestones. She researches and writes about the lost history of Devon women writers.
by the tips of twigs in the linhay-field hedge.
She reels us, reels us in.
We, her ladybird t-shirted children
slip inside, fit snugly in the hollow
of her branch-nest bower,
swaddled in the coil of her moss-lined palm.
A chattery congregation, tiny twittery finch,
a dormouse, the rarer fritillary –
all pitch in with the chit-chat
of marginals, telling us how much she loves us.
We are her traveller’s joy.
Afraid of losing us
she lathes, then swashes our faces
with her wild-rose leaves,
her willows brush our long-hair tangles
and in the ambient whispers of sweet nothings
we lull to sleep in the canopy’s swing-harmonies –
backed by harps of hawhorn, beech, ash.
Knowing we are hers
we lie on our backs on her oak-leaf bunks
conjuring the scene –
Nancy and Peggy
at the helm
negotiate the Amazonian storm.
first published in Dawntreader in collection Fivestones, Lapwing Publications, 2022.
Collections:
Fivestones, Lapwing Publications, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7391642-7-0;
Tessitura, Shearsman Books, 2013, ISBN 978-1-84861-239-6;
as editor Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84861-048-4
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Anne Sherry is a Writer and Management Consultant. She lives in Winchester but travels widely. Her first collection, Safe Passage, was published in 2014.
My love who promised the earth
then pawned it all away
my love shouldered like Goliath
with the belly of a mollusc
my love with a cavalier’s exfoliated thighs
and the swaggering hips of a toreador
my love who adored my classic clothes
then recommended froth and flowers
my love with the feet of a ballerina
and the strut of a petulant brat
my love who liked my symbolic phrases
then told me not to play mind-games
my love with Blue Beard’s hooked nose
in the baby face of a petit ingénu
my love who appreciated my honesty
then devalued me for being naïve
my love who made me writhe and pant
then fled when I expected the same
my love with eyes like brackish pools
which obscured an Arctic mind
my love who hijacked my freedom
but clung limpet-like to his own
my love who chided me for vacillation
then revealed each endgame in his book
my love with the evasive tongue
which accused me of lying by omission
my love who scorned my secure life
then grabbed one for his own
my love with generous Gemini words
underscored actions of Scrooge
my love who promised to always be there
then scarpered when things got tough
my love whose past killed our present
contaminated my future.
That love who left me on a Pyrrhic fire
but missed this harpy eagle flying hope.
Publications:
Failing to Find Old Sarum, 2019, Mudfog Press, ISBN 978-0-9927930-1-2, £5.95 (free p&p)
Safe Passage, a Memoir in Poetry and Prose, 2014, Ashbrook Publications, ISBN 978-0-9927930-0-5, £7.95 +p&p,
(proceeds after costs to Alzheimer’s Research UK, www.cpibookdelivery.com)
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Denni Turp’s work has been published in magazines including Prole, Butcher’s Dog, Tears in the Fence, South Bank Poetry, Scintilla, ARTEMISpoetry, Popshot, Poets’ Republic, Shearsman, Spelt, Obsessed with Pipework, anthologies and webzines.
We seek identities, need stories
to enable us to find some sense
as we are all lost in the immensity
of self and all those other selves
we wander in between our birth and death.
There and here is the failing we refuse
to face of understanding, our pretence
we know ourselves, and how we make
that into Us and Them, and come again
and again and again with guesswork that we have
to ratchet up with claim and counter claim.
We are so desperate to own identities,
to belong somewhere in time and space,
to leave some trace, so we fence a place
as ours, mark out the borders, develop and control
the codes we write and speak, share them
only carefully to keep them pure. We are
post-Babel. We are a lonely species.
Scattered. Insecure.
Denni Turp article at Poetry Wales
e-mail Denni Turp
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet