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)
After 25 years in Belgium, Ann Milton is preparing for the adventure of returning to the UK, an adventure which will furnish her with more poems as she draws on the daily life of herself and her family.
Her descent through the water slows,
the threatening storm
no longer pulls her down, even creates
her buoyancy. Freed from
helplessness in a downward torrent
she begins to stretch out weary legs –
too light a motion to be called swimming, yet
the first sign of hope since the day she heard
her daughter had became her son.
The water grows warmer as her body reaches
for the light shimmering through the waves
still far above. The weight drains away
and empowers her to rise. She knows
life will never be the same again, lungs
made raw by long submersion, fingers frozen
in the unexplored depths: yet she laughs
because the dark fear of this time
has become the strength she needs.
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Caroline Gill won 1st Prize in the Petra Kenney Poetry Competition (gen. section) in 2007. Her poem, Preseli Blue, featured on BBC Poetry Please from the Guardian Hay Festival 2008. Poems published in UK, India, Romania & USA. Home: Ipswich.
Who hears the bells of Rhymney as they toll?
There are no drams to draw along the tracks:
the empty tarmac waits for laden trucks,
but hollows in the hillside tell their tale.
The winch and winder man have long since gone:
deserted pits are crudely steeped in slag.
Would Shelley’s spirit ring out once again
if flames of silver leaped to greet the lark?
A sloping cemetery will testify
to times when angry voices could be heard.
An echo rises from the Rhymney bard:
it rocks and rolls a piercing lullaby.
The grass is brown: brass bands have lost their sheen,
but April’s music trickles down the rill.
A shaft of sun makes rainbow-puddles shine
in terraced streets, to light the poet’s trail.
Allotments snake along the mountain road,
with weathered water butts of blue and green.
A raven waits while seeds of hope are sown,
but wigwam-canes stand vacant and betrayed.
A poet plants his footsteps in the mire,
through furnaces and forges razed to soil.
Bare strips of sky and horizontal moor
arouse defiant voices in his soul.
Stonemasons shed their monumental tears
in mounds below the monkey puzzle’s arm.
A sombre moon cast shadows on the dawn:
a valley dreams beneath the midnight stars.
Note: A dram is a cart for carrying coal
Poem published: THE SEVENTH QUARRY (ed. Peter Thabit Jones), no.3, Winter 2006. Also on the Poetry Library Southbank Centre Website.
Publications:Six poems in Hidden Dragons / Gwir a Grymus, (Parthian 2004), ISBN 9781902638393, £7.99
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Hertfordshire born, married, one son, two daughters, Diana Helen Pritchard lives in Guernsey. A wilderness upbringing during the 1950s, and 1960s in British Columbia, Canada influences her poetry. She is a member of Guernsey Writers.
Beside my heart; the pump,
the one that circulates my blood,
there is another heart.
Not the heart guided by emotion,
but a gnarled, heavy, black, stone heart
invisible even to an X-ray.
It wasn’t born with me,
just entered my body one day,
found its way through my skin
through an unguarded fissure,
reached the essence of me
before I could mouth my own name.
Beady as a cock-robin’s eye at first,
this ‘anti-matter’ absorbing my childhood,
imploded to the size of the universe
until the ‘real’ heart; the pump,
the one that circulates my blood,
wanting to be rid of it, found a solution.
It started my body running
across fields, along riverbanks,
up gravel tracks, over the snows
into the medals on sports day
(never good enough of course)
always striving for the big burn.
The black-heart stone smouldered.
The body started marathoning
over the downs, into muddy ditches,
along highways, over cobbled streets
through green forests and desert dunes.
The black-stone heart caught alight,
flamed up, burned down,
became smaller than a cock-robin’s eye
and I opened my arms to my existence.
Poem published in Published in Jersey Arts 2005 Competition Anthology (Commended).
Publications (all available at Amazon):
One Wrong Foot, Shortcliff, 2022, ISBN 9781919614427, £6.50
My Paths to Freedom, autobiography, Shortcliff 2021, ISBN 9781919614403, £12.99
Poems Inspired by Objects, Shortcliff, 2022, ISBN 9781919614434 £6.50
Shortcliff Poetry
e-mail Diana Helen Pritchard
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Helen Ivory, poet and visual artist; sixth Bloodaxe Books collection Constructing a Witch (2024). Editor, webzine Ink Sweat and Tears; poetry tutor, UEA/WCN online; work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek for Versopolis.
When they laced me tight this morning
my body split asunder.
Clouds heaved themselves across my eyes.
Nobody heard the crack of rib
or witnessed the small moth of my soul
slip from my mouth.
All day I felt the separation so keenly,
yet the household continued about me
as if unaltered.
When Nell came to dust the parlor,
I feared for my soul – my little ghost –
settled on the mantle.
At dinner, my soul watched from the wallpaper
as I raised the soup spoon to my lips –
there wasn’t space beneath my corset for a single bite.
I rose to reach my hand out
but her wings blurred ash.
I felt the table and the diners fall away.
I awoke inside this little room
to find the doctor had been summoned,
with his new, mechanized instrument.
My binding had been loosed,
the doctor applied the treatment
until a paroxysm possessed me.
I breathed deeply of the whole earth.
My soul flew into my open throat.
My husband dropped some coins into his hand.
from The Anatomical Venus, 2019, Bloodaxe Books.
Publications:
Constructing a Witch, 2024, Bloodaxe Books
Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems, 2023, MadHat Press (USA)
The Anatomical Venus, 2019, Bloodaxe Books
Maps of the Abandoned City, 2019, SurVision
Waiting for Bluebeard, 2013, Bloodaxe Books
Helen Ivory website
e-mail Helen Ivory
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
June Hall is a former Faber editor. Death of her son and diagnosis of Parkinson’s drew her to poetry. Her work appears in Acumen, ARTEMISpoetry and elsewhere, incl. three poetry collections. She co-edited with Dr R V Bailey The Book of Love and Loss.
Your bone-hard mouth, like an open cave,
seaweed stretched over jagged rock-teeth,
gulps at the tide that sucks, in and out,
breathing rough, insistent spray. I hold
your drowning hand so tight blood drains
from it in white waves as if I were the parent,
you the child stranded in nightmare seas.
In the wreckage of lost life I don’t know who
or where you are, or if you know me at all.
I too am wrecked, a stranger to this vast ocean.
Muscles tighten and cramp, fearful
at your going, so far beyond my horizon.
Still, I hope my grip steadies you, that you feel
its squeeze, take in my muttered lovings.
Here by your bedside I want to call you home
though already you’re panting to push through
the storm’s growl and I’m rowing the wreckage,
one hand clutched to your fleshless claw, trying
to stay up and keep the rhythm of the stroke until
fingers twine around the rightness of your going,
reconciled at last to the distance between us.
Dying is a challenging business.
Over the crashing foam I cry out to you:
I’m here. Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll stay right here.
Hours later, though, I break my word and have
to leave your side. You let your grasp loosen
and, out of reach now, sink down alone
to the rock below, the uncharted sea-bed.
in collection Uncharted
Publications:
Uncharted, 2016, Belgrave Press, ISBN 978-0-9546215-3-7, £9.99
Bowing to Winter, 2010, Belgrave Press, ISBN 978-0954621513, £7.99
The Now of Snow, 2004, Belgrave Press, ISBN 0-9546215-0-6, £7.99
First Sixty: The Acumen Anthology, 2010, Acumen, ISBN 978-1-8731612-3-4, £9.99
Cracking On, anthology, 2010, Grey Hen Press, ISBN 978-0-9552952-4-9, £10
web-pages on poetry p f
e-mail
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Lynne Wycherley finds herself drawn to light-haunted landscapes – a legacy, perhaps, of childhood by the Fens. Her lyrical and sometimes metaphysical poems have featured widely. (Her recent prizes include the Second Light poetry competition and the E.A. Fellows’ Prize).
Beyond the Barrier, fear’s grey wall,
it appears from nowhere –
a strip of blue, transcendent blue,
as if a thousand kingfishers
fell from heaven.
Glance again and it’s gone,
mist’s sleight of hand,
its voltage trace still printed on your soul.
* Barrier – Churchill Barrier (Scapa Flow)
in collection Poppy in a Storm-Struck Field
Publications (selection, all with Shoestring Press):
Brooksong & Shadows, 2021
The Testimony of the Trees, 2018
Listening to Light: New & Selected Poems, 2014
Poppy in a Storm-struck Field, 2009, ISBN 978-1-907356-00-1. £9
North Flight, 2006
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Maureen lives in North Wales. Poems published in Iota, Poetry Nottingham, Other Poetry, Second Light, Helicon, and various other magazines. Success in local competitions. Chapbooks: Shared Ground and Turtle Stone. She is currently working on a new collection, Alternatives.
It would have been a July afternoon
with everyone piling out into the sun.
And I remember the dog rose blooming
in a flush of pink, as we waded through green meadows,
hunting for lucky leaves among the purple clover.
Then someone made a daisy chain, and suddenly
we were all crowned in gold and white,
and there were butterflies,
(orange tip, common blue, cabbage white)
dancing around our heads.
And I recall those colours midsummer bright,
but any sounds have slipped away.
Memory runs a silent film, which is strange
and sad, because I’m sure, so very sure,
that all our hearts were singing.
Publications: Chapbooks, Shared Ground and Turtle Stone
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
On Cigarette Papers, Pam Zinnemann-Hope’s debut collection, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. It was adapted by her for the Afternoon Play on radio 4 in which she also acted. She runs poetry seminars near Dorchester.
On the day my bankrupt father married me off
the luck sat more in my husband’s cup
than mine, believe me. Lazar broke the glass
for us in Krakow; a broken glass
is meant to bring you luck. But I’d already
turned my back on my dreams, cut up
my ball-gown stitched with seed pearls,
the dumb song-birds on my own embrodiery;
I spoke sternly to my tiny stubborn heart;
I stood straight with Lazar under the canopy;
I dropped my eyes to his uncultured vowels.
What could I do while the gold band slid
onto my finger? Make a secret vow:
never forgive my father, or fall in love.
in collection On Cigarette Papers, Ward Wood, 2012
Publications:
On Cigarette Papers, Ward Wood, 2012, ISBN 978-0-9568969-8-8
Who’s In The Next Room, HappenStance, 2010, ISBN 978-1-9059395-1-0
4 Ned books, Walker Books, 1986/7/8, ISBN 978-0-744 5062-6-6 (& 3 following)
NW15, Anthology of New Writing, Granta, 2007
Pam Zinnemann-Hope at Ward Wood
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Sue Wallace-Shaddad is a Suffolk- based poet with an MA from The Poetry School/Newcastle University (2020). Her poems are widely published and she is digital writer-in-residence for the Charles Causley Trust and Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society
Head against cheek,
arms holding tight,
they rise from the water
like disembodied ghosts.
No words to explain
from where they have come.
The sea is a foreign place.
Not all will escape.
poem from Sleeping Under Clouds, a collaboration with artist Sula Rubens
Publications:
Sleeping Under Clouds, art and poetry pamphlet, 2023, Clayhanger Press, ISBN 978-1-7391770-2-7, £10
Art (anthology), 2021, Hybrid Press, ISBN 978-1-8734121-6-9
A City Waking Up, pamphlet, 2020, Dempsey & Windle ISBN 978-1-9133292-6-6, £8
A working life, self-published pamphlet 2014, out of print
Sue Wallace-Shaddad website
e-mail Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet