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)
Carla Scarano D’Antonio is an Italian teacher, poet, short story writer and painter. She contributes reviews to London Grip, Write Out Loud, South, the High Window, Woking Writers Circle website, Tears in the Fence, Pulsar and other magazines.
‘Words dry and riderless’
Sylvia Plath, Words
The echo of the inexpressible
appears among lines
carving what I don’t know yet
configuration of signs.
Are words good enough?
We feel to use them literally.
What’s my pleasure in using words?
I encounter them on a journey
of recovery,
reimagining the past
in a memoir of self-discovery
turning at last
to the bottom of the pool.
Poem published in Acumen, 102
Publications:
Negotiating Caponata, Dempsey & Windle, July 2020
A Winding Road, Chiaroscuro, 2011, ISBN 978-0-9569264-1-8 (self-published)
Carla Scarano D’Antonio website
Carla Scarano D’Antonio blog
e-mail Carla Scarano D’Antonio
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Ruth Hanchett is a member of the Poetry Society, two stanza groups, The British Haiku Society, Enfield Poets and Second Light. She writes particularly from close observation of people and of herself, exploring social and emotional themes arising.
I
I fell as from a great height into another world.
From a flat plane I stared up at the night sky
and moonlike faces which seemed to ponder
my angle on the slab of stone.
In a smudge of morphine I still screamed.
I lost myself, and, subject, patient,
was propelled into a timeless zone.
Rigid in ambulance straps, under lights, I could not
count the hours, could not recognise the place
but entered a country where people in white
told me what to do, what they would do. I heard
the snap of scissors through my new jeans,
heard murmurs that the hip was broken, felt
the catheter slip in, the movements
of shapes in the dark; floating in a hospital gown
I felt the lift into bed, sleep merging into the oblivion
of surgery, the awakening in the ward, the surgeon
above me, It’s gone well, it’s up to you now, but,
for weeks, the systems flowed over me, journeys
took me down dazzlingly long corridors then back
to staring at walls and waiting for visitors
who came like angels and didn’t tell me what to do.
Physiotherapists, lean and smiling, began to nudge me
nearer to myself and I moved towards it.
At home again the ground was rough, uneven
but my steps became discerning. I grew taller,
so much taller.
Pamphlet, Some Effects of Brilliance, 2019, Rafael Q Publishers, ISBN 978-1-901017-20-5, £5.00
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Hilaire is co-author with Joolz Sparkes of London Undercurrents. She was poet-in-residence at Thrive Battersea in 2017 and Highly Commended in the 2019 Live Canon International Poetry Prize. She writes and gardens in Battersea.
Was it only our family he visited
at dead of night? Slipping bone-handled knives,
dimpled thimbles, an heirloom coffee spoon,
into his felt-lined pockets. His thefts small,
intermittent, occasionally reversed.
Look what’s turned up under the sink!
Triumphant, Dad held aloft a pewter
napkin ring, long lost. This was not
the stuff of nightmares.
Grown up, abroad, I found the Sheffield Man
unknown amongst my peers – a family quirk,
a joke I only got in retrospect.
But now he’s back and he’s greedy,
working daylight hours behind my mother’s back.
The peg tin, can opener, keys. Her reading glasses.
All magicked away out of sight.
He’s even filched the whatchamacallit
and the reason she first needed it.
I stab pins into a Sheffield Man doll
even though I know there’s no reversing
this final vanishing act.
Highly commended in the Red Shed Open Poetry Competition 2018 and published in The Quality of the Moment competition pamphlet, Currock Press
Publications:
indoors looking out, lower case press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-5272-6319-2 £5
London Undercurrents,, Holland Park Press, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-907320-82-8 £10
Triptych Poets: Issue OneBlemish Books, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-9807556-1-9
Hearts on Ice, Serpent’s Tail, 2000 ISBN: 1-852426-63-2
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Doreen Hinchliffe has been published widely in anthologies and magazines, including Acumen, Mslexia, Orbis, The Interpreter’s House and Magma. Her first collection, Dark Italics, was published by Indigo Dreams in October 2017.
Practise the art of getting lost
in the deepest forest, not knowing where
it ends, like the leaf of an oak tossed
on a sudden wind, unaware
of anything except the flight
in dappled sun, the ripples of air,
conscious only of slanting light
through branches, of being borne and held,
indifferent to left or right
to future or to past, propelled
into the heart of now by powers
unfathomed, unseen, deep in the meld
and mould of earth, in its tiny flowers
(bluer than bluebells, whiter than frost)
that lie beyond the counting of hours
and the counting of the cost.
Poem published in Acumen, Issue 87
Publications:
The Pointing Star, sonnet sequence, Live Cannon Poems for Christmas CD, ASIN: B01N8Z2E1T
Dark Italics, 2017, Indigo Dreams, ISBN 978-1-910834-58-9
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
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
Jenna Plewes lives in Worcestershire, belongs to Cannon Poets and escapes to Devon whenever she can. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including Heart Shoots (for Macmillan Cancer Support). She was highly commended in the Hastings International Competition 2012.
When I die
don’t put me underground
cut down a giant oak
as they did
four thousand years ago
pull out the stump
drag it across the wide salt marsh
with honeysuckle ropes
upend it where the curlews call
lay me across its outstretched hand
under the sun, the moon
the turning stars
encircle me in
fifty trunks of oak
each split in two
fold a seamless skin of bark around my bier
leave me the smell of fresh cut wood
the shine of pale oak flesh
the sound of wind and tide
birds will clean my bones
midsummer’s rising sun will
find me through the keyhole of the east
and when midwinter sunrise looks for me
I will be gone.
Seahenge on the Norfolk coast is a prehistoric monument built in the 21st century BC.
Winning poem in the Sampad competition and published in their anthology Inspired by my Museum.
Publications:
Pull of the Earth, 2016, Indigo Dreams Publishing, ISBN 978-1-9108340-6-0, £8.99 +p&p
Gifts, 2014, CreateSpace, ISBN 978-1-4953944-0-9 £5 – proceeds to charity (buy direct from Jenna Plewes)
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