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)
Annest Gwilym is the author of three books of poetry: Surfacing (2018), What the Owl Taught Me (2020) and Seasons in the Sun (2023). She has been widely published, & placed/nominated in competitions, Best of the Net and Wales Book of the Year Award.
Inspired by Helen Dunmore’s Glad of these times.
I open my back door
to the high clean ozone of the tide,
when the chill small evening
clinks with sounds of crockery
from the beach-side bistro
and wine-hazed banter.
And I’m glad of cormorants
that dry their wings
on the jetty’s end,
sloe-dark eyes of a surfacing seal,
plants that grow
despite the wind’s salt charge.
Glad that in spite of poverty
there are watery days
of soft rain and poetry,
the past that is always present
beneath the surface of earth and our skin,
the lost graves of my peasant ancestors.
Glad of the balm this place brings
to a frightened rescue dog
who now calls it home,
for being able to stand on my step at night,
sniff the air like a fox,
for what the wind brings.
Poem first published in The Dawntreader, Autumn 2019;
also in Fevers of the Mind, 9 June 2021.
Nominated for Best of the Net 2021.
Publications:
Seasons in the Sun, 2023, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, ISBN 978-1-8452793-8-7
What the Owl Taught Me, 2020, Lapwing Publications, ISBN 978-1-9163457-4-4
Surfacing, 2018, Lapwing Publications, ISBN 978-1-9108558-1-2
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
Helena Hinn lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. She has been published by Virago, Faber and Faber, and in Women’s Press anthologies and has a published collection of prose, Histories of the Imagination.
pins are silver – the colour of the moon
long ago women would throw pins into wells
giving back to the earth
a tiny part of what had been taken
the tiny insignificant pin
which is invaluable to women
: to secure when sewing
: to fix, to enable work to happen
women work for pin money
an insubstantial amount to the world
but essential to them
if women had an emblem
I would promote the pin
to the world it seems a small unimportant object
but women understand the value of a pin
and women’s values
know the essential nature of the tiny
and its part in the whole
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
Justina Hart was short-listed in the 2010 Second Light competition and has been published in the Daily Poem column of the Independent. Having worked in national newspapers and online, Justina is currently writing a poetry collection and a novel.
When you flash upon me,
yanking the voice from my throat,
I’m usually peeling potatoes
or combing my just-woken hair
or, worse, in bed with my not-quite-lover
who’s helped pull me clear.
And you freeze me: peeler,
hairbrush, almost-lover in hand,
like that giant iguana I once saw
suddenly play dead, one foot high
in the air as if it was having a laugh,
not petrified, like me.
You rip all sound from the room
so it slips, cliffs rise, drop away.
There’s that pause when nothing happens
before everything does; and I’m falling
like David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death
when his bombed Spitfire plunges, and he pleads
to be spared – he loves the radio control chick
on the line he’s never even met.
Through the smoke and flames
I see, for a second, a reprieve for me, too –
if I had another life, I’d never walk out again,
leaving me and you just hanging.
Publications:
Angels: millennial messengers, 2000, Seraphim Press, ISBN 0953577902
The Rhythm of Stones, 1995, Carnival Press, ISBN 1899378014
Address: Lichfield and London
e-mail
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Lyn Moir, a Hawthornden Fellow, lives in St. Andrews. Her latest of four collections is Velásquez’s Riddle (Calder Wood Press, 2011). Her work is much published, including in Second Light’s major anthologies and in many of those from Grey Hen Press.
Rather compare me to a winter’s night,
snow on the roof and not much on the fire.
Even December’s gales have lost their bite.
Can you remember what it was, desire?
Passion’s a concept creaking with disuse,
a half-remembered trembling in the gut
at unexpected moments, an excuse
for rutting, heaving bodies mingling… but
the time for that is over, says my head.
My stiffening bones concur, my sinews scream,
stretched on the rack of years. We’re not yet dead,
just dying. Summer’s still midwinter’s dream
and we its shadows, turning on the wheel
of time, condemned to watch, no more to feel.
published in South 54, 2016
Publications:
Velázquez’s Riddle, Calder Wood Press 2011
Easterly, Force 10, Calder Wood Press 2009
Breakers’ Yard, Arrowhead Press 2003
Me and Galileo, Arrowhead Press 2001
2 Shorehead
St. Andrews
Fife
KY16 9RG
tel: 01334 472717
e-mail
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Mary Robinson’s work is concerned with connections between people, place and nature. She is interested in text – reading, writing, interpretation, shape. She particularly responds to the visual and has worked on a poetry/photography collaboration.
for Helen
I came to an open gateway
and at that same instant a hare entered
my field of vision. I am still. I am seeding grass,
brambles, nettles. She follows her known path,
a few steps at a time, pausing for scent
in the air, a tremor of earth beneath her feet.
When does she sense my presence?
She halts
a shadow’s length away. How quick she is
in her stillness, every hair of her pelt
pricked, every nerve taut as wire.
Which of us will break this moment?
I want the legend of the hare who hid
from the hunters under the skirts
of Saint Melangell at prayer to be true.
in collection Trace, Oversteps Books, 2020
first published in anthology For the Silent, ed. Ronnie Goodyer, Indigo Dreams, 2019
Publications:
Trace, 2020, Oversteps Books, ISBN 978-1-906856-85-4, £8
Alphabet Poems, 2019, Mariscat Press, ISBN 978-1-9160609-2-0, £6
Out of Time (with photographs by Horatio Lawson), 2015, Westward Books, signed numbered edition, ISBN 978-0-9538477-3-0, £6
Uist Waulking Song, 2012, Westward Books, signed numbered edition, ISBN 978-0-9538477-2-3, £4.50
The Art of Gardening, 2010, Flambard, ISBN 978-1-906601-14-0
Literature Wales
Mary Robinson at poetry p f
e-mail Mary Robinson
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Nadine Brummer Has had poems published in many magazines and in many anthologies. First full collection ‘HalfWay to Madrid’ (Shoestring Press, 2002) was made a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
That night, finding him in my bed,
within kissing distance,
I wanted to take the stare
off his face – those eyes
all bulge and goggle.
Then I saw their depth, a look
that could take me anywhere
backwards in time. I recalled
an aquarium under the sea where
I’d pressed my face to the glass
of a wolf-eel’s tank, mesmerised
by a little reptilian head
with eyeballs lifting off
like spaceships that settled
into an expression beyond
a seal-pup’s dopey smile
or the pout of fish –
like that of some new-born child
you swear has been here before.
The frog was like him,
but when he gulped and a mouth
smelling of weed or bull-kelp
came close to my lips
I flinched and held out my hand
to stop his jump and touched
a spasm of green, a creature trying
to slither out of himself.
I’ve been so often trapped
In flesh that didn’t feel mine
I wondered what he could see
when he gazed into a pond;
he took my sigh as a signal
to kiss. I loved him best
the moment before he changed,
a small, crouched, alien thing
in need of a body.
Poem published: Poetry London, May 2003
Publications:
What Light Does, Shoestring Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1-910323-90-8 £10
Any Particular Day, Shoestring Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-907356-66-7 £9
Out of the Blue, Shoestring Press, 2006, ISBN 987-1-904886-31-0 £8.95
Half Way to Madrid, Shoestring Press, 2002. ISBN 1-899549-70-6 £7.50 (Poetry Book Society Recommendation)
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Roz Chalk: After many years of teaching in london and lecturing in painting at Ruskin Cambridge Roz resumed her interest in poetry, reading across a wide range of voices, and writing new and revising her old poems.
The river run is wide today
and high after all the rain
flooded to the banking walls
where the stone beach ends.
Mo tells me: Jo’s had another episode.
They found him howling on High Cliff.
His doctors recommend a couple of years
they mean more of course
at Bridport
too far from his mother’s
and there’s no-one to take her
no-one has time to take her. Sometimes
she can’t find her way to the recycling.
Sure, she can tell you all you’d want
to know of air-scape flight of the glider
over the moor, the Cornubian Batholith,
the dating of xenotime samples,
the 40 distinct minerals
and tin mine cassiterite, then
lose the way to the end of her garden.
But, leaning on the Moorstone
memory speaks,
all fizz and dazzle,
her and Mo on the sea wall
smoking and laughing,
watching the boats
bank up the stones
above the tide-lines fringe.
Poem published in Academia.edu paper Places by Water:poetic enquiries,
(as Runayker, visual artist with Roz Chalk, nom de plume for poetry).
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
I am a retired lecturer in English Literature. I write poetry and short stories and I have just completed a memoir, and I’m now working on a novel. I contine to write poetry as it is my first love.
What picture soothed the mind’s eye
and brought her to life again?
Maybe the white pillow case on the line
puffed up and puckered like a barnacle goose.
Or the memory of my first love,
waiting for me in his room, while I
a callow, skimp of a girl – barely
seventeen, and not yet broken in –
carelessly lingered by the landing
window, where below, over the fence,
I saw a young mother, pegging
out nappies in the snow along
a frosted loop of rope – her red hair
plaited and coiled like a coronet
to frame the loveliness of her face.
And I found myself caught in the silent
beauty and rhythm of her movement –
arching down, and reaching up
on the ringing, frosted path –
her raw, worn hands pinching
the corners of her parchment poetry –
her masterpieces stretched out to dry.
I didn’t know then that her mirrors
were already sheeted, and her spirit
demised with every shot of breath.
I didn’t know she wanted a sarcophagus
stamped with the face of the moon – bold, too, with tigery stripes,
and her body embalmed in warm
honey to lie beside her copper cauldron
and rouge-pots, glowing vermillion
like the eyes of a predatory god.
And her heart to be wrapped
in brown paper, tied up with string
and tucked between her bare, crossed feet.
23 Fitzroy Road is a prize winning poem: Sentinel Poetry competition, September 2012
Publications:
Short Story, Crake’s Troll, published in collection Significant Spaces,
Earlyworks Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-9064518-6-8 £8.99
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet
Vivienne Tregenza, past comp. winner at Poetry on the Lake, is included in Cornish New Poetries (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Her first collection Conversations with Magic Stones (poems in memory of Barbara Hepworth) is due from Indigo Dreams in 2025.
I see the sculptor
at the centre
of this bright necklace
of houses strung along the bay,
held safe in its curve
looking out towards the sea
and distant shorelines…
I imagine her
finishing her morning coffee,
lighting a cigarette or two,
eager to get on
with the day’s work,
to feel the warm caress
of wood beneath her hands…
The light is Mediterranean
as she carves
to the rhythm
of a hammering heartbeat,
counterpoint
to the screams
of wind and water.
Poem published in Poetry Scotland, 2024
Copyright© of all poems featured on this site remains with the poet