MO2

FHP2

Jen Thorne

Sue Finch (MO2)

Lin Hart (FHP2)

Lin Hart (MO2)

Dave Ashley

C Oulens

Scissors 

Scissors—a crocodile—
comes for our world our words
and tears first laws, then jokes,
then history, and next—the future.

All non-crocodilian futures
bitten to flakes, even the books
our feathers, the spines,
the loops positrons make 
in the ink-chamber of sight.

Did we not clean your teeth?

Dave Garbutt (MO2)

The Red Flags (All Artworks)
 
See a ruin it might matter one day.
Everything is broken. Not showing
his face. Very faithful words. Waterway
in a war zone. I am purifying
 
said the fragment. They want to kill us we'll 
kill them first my fierce angel we rough
wrap around one another in this healed
grave you're trying to be perfect enough
 
that he stops noticing others. Passive.
Choice is active. He's a seaside shuttered
stall that still notices that effective
war slosh of rain sleet snow ice unfettered.
 
Beyond this wrapped grave the whole world's on fire.
This cracked family is ruined desire.

Paul Brookes

Artworker Bios And Artistic Statements

Molly Ovenden (MO)

Artist Statement:

In this April 2026 collection, “New Light, Returning Daily,” I wanted to explore using familiar materials with unfamiliar methods. I combined off-cuts from my “scrapings” paintings, pages from a rescued Bible that had been damaged, and a variety of mixed media materials to make something new with collage in a cohesive collection. When I consider how day-to-day life can feel mundane, the same day-after-day, or simply a repeat of dull life that offers next to no progress, I easily miss the beauty in small, secret, quiet moments. As this series of 30 pieces unfolds, I created it to capture the variety, emotions, beauty, and depth of everyday life on the daily; viewing each piece (or, each day this month) separately may reveal one thing for a viewer, but to experience each piece together may offer a new perspective, a new light, on our everyday mundane upon returning daily.

Bio:

Molly Ovenden is a contemplative poet and painter based in Leeds, England. She writes poems for people on the spot with her vintage typewriter and moments of emotion through expressive abstract paintings. For Molly, inspiration comes from running and wandering through nature, seeking God in everyday small moments, and holding spaces for people to be present with emotions. Molly believes that everyone is made to create: whether they paint or write poetry, or build literal bridges as a civil engineer or relational bridges as a great neighbour, it all takes creativity. The concept “Beauty is an arrow of Hope that points to Peace” drives Molly to capture, create, and share beauty with others–especially through poems and paintings.

Contact for Availability and Purchasing:

To view full collection, visit: https://mollyovenden.com/art/

To contact for availability and Purchasing – UK only shipping – visit: https://mollyovenden.com/contact/Facebook | Instagram – @mollyovendencreativity For Blog About Artwork, visit: 

https://mollyovenden.substack.com/

Phil Hyde

GP Hyde was born on the Wirral and now lives in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, UK. He studied fine art and photography at Goldsmith’s College and at the Royal Academy Schools. He worked in theatre, art centres and community arts as a photographer, writer and production manager for 14 years and as a lecturer and senior manager in creative arts for 25 years.

His photography has been featured in Underbelly Press in issues 5 and 6. His influences include Tony Ray Jones, Martin Parr and Tom Wood.

socials: @gphydeauthor

Francis H Powell

Francis H. Powell studied both painting and printmaking at art schools in Britain, obtaining a Master of Arts degree. Since leaving art school, he has participated in exhibitions in both the UK and France, including group exhibitions and solo shows. His work ranges across paintings, drawings, mixed media, sculptures, and installations, sometimes incorporating political themes, such as plastic waste in the sea. His installations also include soundscapes and video. In addition to his visual art, his illustrations have been included in books.  

Below is a list of exhibitions…

Exhibitions 20252024//2023 Salon d’art de Moret-Loing-et-Orvanne

2022 show Studio 58, Brittany 2015 One man show Style Pixie Gallery 2008 one man show gallerie L’Usine Paris 2007 one man show Theatre du Poche. Chartres. 2006 l’église de L’hôpital de la Salpêtrière 2006 Carrousel du Louvre 2005 Group Exhibition IVY Gallery Bastille 2005 Vente Art Contemporain, Paris and Marseille. (for Aides charity) 2001 Live Art Show le Divan du Monde Paris. 1987 Final Post graduate show, Wimbledon School of Art. 1987 Royal Society of Painter, Etchers and Engravers, Bankside Gallery 1986 “In and out of print”, Swiss College Library Exhibition Hall 1985 Studies in composition (the Professor studio) the Royal College of Art 1983 Leicestershire Collection for schools and Colleges Baumanor Hall 1983 Stowells Trophy Royal Academy 1983 Windsor and Newton Finalist Royal Institute of Painters Mall Gallery Studied at 1985-87 Wimbledon School of Art MA printmaking. 1979-80 Eastbourne College of Art 1980-83 Glos College of Art and Technology BA (Hons) painting  

Author Bios:

Jen Thorne

C. Oulens 

is an emerging poet and former academic from India. Winner of the 3rd Annual Poe-It Like Poe 2025 poetry contest, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Broken Spine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Candyman’s Trumpet, Eunoia Review, Spillwords Press, The Starbeck Orion, Temple in a City, Sixty Odd Poets, SHINE International, The Book Bag, FromOneLine, SciFanSat, Verseve and in haiku journals including Pan Haiku Review, 575 Haiku Journal, Poetry Pea, The Wee Sparrows, Haiku Pause, The Solitary Daisy, Folk Ku, Failed Haiku, and Heterodox Haiku. Explore her works on Bluesky @owlnsquirrels1111.bsky.social.

Jane Sharp

Donna Faulkner

lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Free spirited and unconventional, she came to the business of writing later in life. She’s published in The Madrid Review , Alchemy Spoon,  The Bayou Review, 300 Days of Sun, Windward Review, Havik, New Myths, and many others. Her poetry book In Silver Majesty was published by the UK based erbacce press in 2024.https://www.erbacce-press.co.uk/donna-faulkner

Instagram: @lady_lilith_poet  X@nee_miller  

Website: https://linktr.ee/donnafaulkner

Lin Hart

Lin describes herself as a poet, satirist, and zinester from West Virginia. A married, mother of two who eats numbers for work and is definitely a neurospicy cryptid in disguise. Find out more on Bluesky.

Luke Meyers

Luke is a Welsh performer and poet who discovered a love of writing during the lockdown. Luke mainly writes on Bluesky @sonnetsmith.bsky.social but has also been published in a couple of publications, including the British Fantasy Journal, Icebrakers Lit. Muse Pie Press, From One Line, and Oatleaf Poetry Journal.

Sue Finch

Sue Finch is the author of Magnifying Glass, Welcome to the Museum of a Life, and Vortex Over Wave. She loves the coast, peculiar things, and the scent of ice-cream freezers. 

Mick Jenkinson

Jenni Thorne

is a writer from the Black Country in the UK, and winner of the New2theScene poetry prize for 2025, and has had her work published in various poetry collections and on-line jornals including The Starbeck Orion, Ink, Sweat and Tears, April Showers, Dark Poets, Broken Spine and the Sixty Odd Poets Heresy collection. 

Her work explores the weight of the ordinary, the need for belonging, and the way the lessons of the past and the pressures of modern life shape us.

She shares her writing on Bluesky @jenthorne.bsky.social.

Matt Nicholson is a poet and performer from East Yorkshire. He published his fifth collection, Side-eye, on Yaffle Press, in the summer of 2025. He often performs with 3 other Hull poets as “The 4 Johns”. His work is sometimes dark and visceral, but also sensitive and heart-wrenchingly honest, and even sometimes funny, leading Helen Mort to describe his poems as “capable of breaking your heart and mending it again”. He has toured all around mainland Britain and loves performing to new audiences. For books and more information please visit http://www.mattpoet.com.

The Interview (Originally begun in 2023, updated by Matt in 2025)

Q1 (2023): I last interviewed you in 2020. Please tell me what you’ve been up to since then?

A1(2023): The big project that filled my writing time in 2020 and 2021 was writing and editing the poems that became my fourth poetry collection, “Untanglement”, and because it was very important to me that the poems stood up on the page as well as out loud, I attended many classes and workshops, including those run by Gill and Mark Connors at Yaffle, and mentoring sessions with Helen Mort. I also upped my reading of other people’s poems, pamphlets and collections by way of further ongoing poetry education. “Untanglement” was published by Yaffle Press in the Spring of 2022 and I took it around as many poetry events as I could. In the second half of 2022 I began working with three other poets from my part of the country – Peter Knaggs, Jim Higo, and Mike Watts – and calling ourselves “the 4 Johns”, we did a number of readings, shows and workshops together, and went on to write a Theatre/Spoken Word show, “All we’ve got time for” which premiered in the summer of 2023 and went on, via several theatre performances, to be part of The Morecambe Poetry Festival in that September.

Q2 (2023): How did you decide on the order of the poems in “Untanglement”?

A2(2025): The simple answer, for Untanglement, is that I had help. I think it’s important where poems sit in terms of an order and in relation to one another. I think poems can speak to one another in a collection but also, if you put the big important pieces too close to one another, they can make things imbalanced. As such one would be foolish not to take advice from those with more experience in such matters, and I sort guidance from the editorial team at Yaffle and from Helen Mort to help me get it right. I would like to add to this answer by saying that this is one of the hardest things to be sure about, and there do not seem to be any hard and fast scientific methods for it.

Q3 (2023/2025): How important is narrative in your poetry?

A3 (2025): Narrative has become more important to me during the writing of the last two collections. I wanted to tell more stories alongside the more lyrical poems that I continue to write. I felt able to be more open and honest with the reader by writing more narrative poems such as “Said big me to little me” and “I met him at a counter-demonstration” in “Untanglement”, and I felt that improved all my writing because of this more open, honest approach, and I hope that trend has and will continue.

Q3.1 (2023): How is opening the poem up, making them more story based important for live performance?

A3.1 (2023): I think you need to engage with an audience during a live performance / reading. It is likely, to me, that the poems you are sharing with an audience will engage them more if there is variety in terms of style and also intensity, and if some pieces are easier to engage with than others.

Q4 (2023): How important is form in your poetry?

A4 (2023): Because of the way an idea develops into one of my poems, starting off with how a line sounds to me out loud, and then getting the subsequent lines to develop from that beginning, and often in relation to that original rhythm, there probably aren’t many of my poems that adhere strictly to any classical forms. I do enjoy reading “form” poetry and have tried to write villanelles, sonnets and other forms in workshops etc. but they haven’t been the ones that I have had published, so as yet, it is not a strength I can claim. I think, because my poems all tend to start life orally, they do have elements of conversational/everyday speech in them and so there are bits of naturally occurring/accidental iambic pentameter, and some bits might resemble other elements of form too. And when the words make it onto the page, I find the shape of poems is becoming more interesting to me, but then I’m not sure that’s exactly what you mean by “form” in your question.

Q4.1 (2023): Why is it important that elements of conversation occur in your poetry? I am thinking particularly of Yorkshire dialect?

A4.1 (2023): I think it’s important for characters in poems (as in any literature) to be authentic and relatable, to use vocabulary and sentence structure that adds dimension to them for the reader. How a person speaks is often an immediate way to steer the reader to understand that character and to flesh out their world.

Q5 (2023): What do you think about the idea that a poem’s meaning should always be elusive?

A5 (2025): Over time, I have come to the conclusion that the problem with this notion is the “always” in the question. There are usually reasons why a poet does things in a poem the way they do and decides how to present their words and meanings. If it makes sense to the writer to keep the meaning of a poem elusive, be it for reasons of subject, sensitivity, to influence how a subject is thought about by a reader, or to create some kind of literary enigma for whatever reason, that is just as valid, assuming it’s done well, as it would be if the writer had been explicit and open about the meaning of a poem, as long as that is also done equally as well.

Q6(2025): How did you decide on the order of the poems in your latest book?

A6(2025): Side-eye was written over three years, from the end of 2022 onwards, and it resulted in approximately 350 poems being written for the final 60 to be chosen from. As a result of so many pieces hanging around and coming and going , they were initially separated into eight groups, to make them more manageable and to group poems into subsets by subject matter. As time went on, and as before, following conversations with Helen Mort and Mark Connors, those eight groups were whittled down to 4 by means of merging and rethinking their definitions, and the 350 poems were gradually reduced to about 120. Then as the title of the collection and the tone and themes began to present themselves from that 120, I was able to, with advice, get the number to 60 and to choose the order of the poems and, very late in proceedings, exactly what order those sections would appear in the book.

Q7(2025): What projects are you working on at the moment?

A7(2025): I am a little nervous to say too much about my current focus in case doing so were to jinx it, but I will tell you that it involves writing lots of poems about different fears and phobias, submitting those poems to relevant people and places, and then potentially creating a workshop format that will be based on the same subject matter. I am also looking out for some poets to mentor, who I can pass on all I’ve learned from so many great people over the last ten years or so as a poet myself.

The Interview

Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in your book?

The poems are grouped by theme so that one flows on from the last. At some stages there is a complete change of theme but I try to keep a link between each poem and the one that went before it wherever possible.

Q:2. How do you think that your poetry has moved on from your previous collection?

I think I have given up trying to use forms such as rhyme, sonnets etc. though a few rhyming couplets do work their way in occasionally.  Certainly none of the poems in this book were ever written intending to be rhymed or take any other form. Even though this collection is shorter than my last and indeed my first, there are fewer poems that I have felt unsure about, worrying that they were little more than chopped up prose. There are a couple I think that about, at least partly.  There are a lot of the same themes, places and people featured here that appeared in my previous two collections.  In some ways the book has been more inspired by more recent events,  which is I suppose inevitable,  though the distant past remains a feature of my work, which is also inevitable as other memories have come back to me since I wrote my last two books. I am definitely more aware of myself having aged and aging since I began writing, and I think this is reflected in my poems.

Q:2.1. How has aging affected this collection?

It contains a lot of poems about my childhood,  which is something that I am aware of slipping further an further into the past each day, and a lot of poems about death – though not my own, which – without wanting to sound too depressing, is something I am aware of getting closer to each day.  When I wrote the poem ‘Forty’ which is in my last book, I sounded quite optimistic.  I still do, or try to,  but I think I shall be writing quite a different sort of poem when I get to fifty. There are one or two poems about books and authors, and up until a couple of years ago I spent a lot of my reading time re-reading fiction.  I re-read poetry now but every novel I have read this year and I think last year has been one I haven’t read before.  I am aware that time is no longer standing still, and there are things I have to read while I am still able. This leads me on to one of the many physical signs of aging I have gradually begun to notice. I don’t think I will be able to cope without reading glasses for much longer.

Q:2.1.1. How has the awareness of time slipping by ever faster effected the writing of the poems?

It has reminded me that I can’t keep saying I have got lots of time left to write many more poems, though I hope that is the case. For too long I said I wasn’t writing anything at the moment but always meant or hoped to take it up again one day, when I found the  inspiration.  It has made me prioritise writing the next poem.

Q:2.1.1.1. How has this sense of urgency manifested itself in how and what you write?

It hasn’t made me feel that I must write something every day, even if it’s just a draft, or set aside a particular time each day or even each week for writing,  just to make sure I produce something. I do that with reading but not writing.  Though I do say to myself,  just because I wrote a poem yesterday doesn’t mean I can’t write one today as well. I have been known on rare occasions to write more than one on the same say. In terms of what I write, there are some things and people I have felt I can’t write about while those people are still alive, but if I wait for them to no longer be here then the poem may never get written,  not only because they could outlive me but I may forget the idea.  Once I get an idea for a poem in my head I have to at least try and write it then.

Q:3. How did you decide on the title?

As always,  I used the title of one of the poems in the book. I am not sure that ‘Bloom and Grow’ is the best one in the collection, but it is linked to many of the others by theme,  not just the people mentioned in it. There are not really any poems about plants here but there are ones that mention flowers – tulips and dandelions.  There are poems about fruit – wild raspberries in particular,  and one called ‘Growing Fruit’ although it isn’t about growing real fruit at all but makes mention of marzipan fruits and my first memories of them which brings me back to my grandmother who features in a few of the poems.

Q:4 Your poetry is very interrogative, asking questions of the person’s featured. Intentional?

To an extent I think it is intentional.  There are lots of things I have asked in a poem that I would never really ask the person in the poem, whether they are still alive or not. Many of the questions are rhetorical, asking things we can never know.

Q:4.1. How much do you think this reveals about N’s personality?

I presume you mean ‘N’ mentioned in the poem ‘Bloom and Grow’. I suppose that there were many things I didn’t know about him and couldn’t ask as neither of us felt comfortable discussing them. Though he wasn’t a blood relation, I did and do feel a lot like him, though in many ways we couldn’t have been more different.  I would rather not list the characteristics as it may sound like self-praise.

(Sorry, Peter. N is a technical abbreviation for Narrator. Editor)

To an extent I think it is intentional.  There are lots of things I have asked in a poem that I would never really ask the person in the poem, whether they are still alive or not. Many of the questions are rhetorical, asking things we can never know.

Q:5. Why do you think you are moving away from rhyming poetry?

One of the first things I was told about poems as a child was that they do not have to rhyme,  and yet I don’t remember reading one that didn’t rhyme until I was in my late teens. Back then I wasn’t able to distinguish between verse and poetry, couldn’t always see internal rhyme or half-rhymes. I think I came to believe that you could write anything and so long as it looked like a poem on the page you could call it one. But poetry is meant to be spoken and heard as well as read. I now see that chopped up prose is not poetry just as rhyming verse often is not. Sometimes it is a good idea to work to a form and within the constraints required,  but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I believe the use of similes, metaphors and alliteration, if used well and they don’t sound contrived, is more effective than rhyme or iambic pentameter.

Q:6. How far do you think the title “Bloom And Grow” refers to your own development as a poet?

It wasn’t intended to refer to my flourishing as a poet, but I don’t mind if it is interpreted that way. I wouldn’t say that my third book is my best one yet. As with all of them, I think some of the poems in it are better than others.  It is the shortest, perhaps ironically.  I hope it means that my development is an ongoing process, one that obviously will end one day as everything does, but hopefully not for a very long time.

Q:7. Once having read the collection what do you hope the reader will leave with?

I hope they will have a desire to read more of my work, including my first two books if they haven’t already done so. If they have read the others I hope they will see that my writing style has developed in the two years since my first one was published,  and that they will look forward to my next book, whenever that will appear.

*******

You can buy this collection here:

https://amzn.eu/d/50mr5eR

Exit Strategy (Broken Sleep Books, 2025):

https://amzn.eu/d/6GUphS9

Patrick Wright

is an award-winning poet from Manchester, UK. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Gutter, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, and The London Magazine. His debut pamphlet, Nullaby, was published in 2017 by Eyewear. His debut full-length collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and twice included in The Best New British and Irish Poets anthology. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.

The Interview

PB: How did you decide on the order of the poems in Exit Strategy?

PW:
Given that my book is about the grief process and a possible extrication or ‘exit’ from mourning, I had Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in mind, especially her five stages of grief. While I’m aware her model is subject to critique and perhaps an oversimplification of grief – it’s not, for example, and as some might assume she is saying, a linear process – I found it useful to divide my book into five sections. These don’t correspond directly with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – and I think there’s a few overlaps, callbacks, or foreshadowings – but these stages can be mapped onto my sections, albeit in a loose way. The section dividers – marked with an infinity symbol – are also meant to interrupt or subvert the notion of a linear path, with the suggestion of ongoing love and grief – the latter of which I’ve come to understand as the shadow of love or its extension: how the relationship goes on but operates on a spiritual level.

PB: How important is form in your book?

PW:
Incredibly important, as most of the poems are ekphrastic – looking to be mimetic of abstract or ‘formless’ artworks; not so much a representation as a re-presentation, in a performative way, of a visual art form that poets have rarely confronted. As such, in an attempt to evoke and forge a link with a specific artwork, I experimented with various forms, including sonnets (and near-sonnets), ghazals, prose poems, centos, and a new form I’ve looked to develop, which I call exploding form, where my words are scattered around the page, suggesting a violent detonation. Such forms offer temporary containers and serve as an analogue for grief. This includes my exploding form – since grief can be perceived as a centrifugal force involving dissolution and possible reconstitution. Our sense of identity, through bereavement, can be torn apart, though might, if we survive, form a new or emergent self. Abstract and ‘formless’ art can, likewise, present itself as a kind of metaphor for profound loss – inchoate and reaching towards meaning. My mode of ekphrasis sees such artworks as a prism for grief, and the poem as making sense of what’s refracted.    

PB: What do you mean by ‘an analogue for grief’?

PW:
I mean something – oftentimes a visual art form, or, as I suggest, a poetic form – that corresponds with the disorder, confusion, or ineffability brought about by loss. The bodily experience of grief, which can also be traumatic, is difficult if not impossible to represent straight away through signs; but the medium of the image can help us access unconscious thoughts and sensations – what can feel pre-verbal, somatic, and lodged inside us – and serve as a bridge towards elaboration through language. Mark Rothko’s late works, such as his Seagram Murals, offer obvious examples.

PB: To return to answer earlier comment you made about form. How did the new poetic form emerge?

PW:
Exit Strategy was written as part of my PhD in Creative Writing at the Open University, supervised by Jane Yeh and Siobhan Campbell. My work here (what’s sometimes called ‘practice as research’) focused on examining modes of ekphrasis in response to abstract and ‘formless’ artworks. At the same time, I saw such images as a lens for my personal experience of grief: how a painting could, for example, represent a profound state of loss. What I term exploding form is, as I understand it, imitative of certain modernist works, such as Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter, and, at the same time, visually re-enacts the disarray and loss of structure that can accompany major bereavement. 

PB: What is the role of Nature in this collection?

PW:
That might depend on how ‘Nature’ is construed. It’s a collection that’s quite introspective, with a focus on art galleries, books, postcards, and personal themes – the subjective experience of grief – so there’s little in the way of birds or wildlife, that kind of nature. There are occasional references, such as ‘A Distant Fawn’, where the creature – in this case, a young deer – becomes a symbol for something intangible or metaphysical. It’s as if one element of nature – such as the sea (which I write about quite a bit in response to seascapes, light, and atmosphere) – is a divine messenger or thing to be reckoned with through the anguish. There are also other ways to think of nature, such as human nature, perhaps rage at God and the all-too-human shaking of our fist at the sky. There’s the nature of reality, too (how we are subject to time and mortality), the nature of poetic form, the nature of art, and so forth. I think the collection is rather ambitious in this way, taking on these wider considerations.

PB: Why did you choose the Dostoevsky quote at the beginning of the collection?

PW:
It’s taken from The Brothers Karamazov and meant to evoke the cycle of suffering and redemption. I felt that my journey through grief was part of this age-old and human struggle, coming to terms with the evils of the world and the malice inflicted upon us – in my case, the loss of my partner to cancer. It’s possible others can relate to this – how life can be cruel and unjust to the point where we question everything, where meaning and our sense of self is obliterated. Personally, I reached this nadir. Though my partner and I were always believers in creativity and renewal, and so art and poetry presented themselves as a way out and through the crisis. While writing, I was also inspired by the phoenix motif – how we must go through an agonising phase of burning up and losing one identity before we can gain another; and this kind of regeneration is often necessary for those who experience a significant loss. As we often hear, and though somewhat of a cliché, it’s not that the pain of loss ever goes away or diminishes, but it is possible to grow around it.    

PB: How did you tackle the emergence of the phoenix from the flames, the recovery of meaning?

PW:
I think the artworks I responded to or anticipated had a significant role to play – the beauty of the paint, for example, or my reverence for ideals within Modernism; and the collection can certainly be seen as a homage to Modernism. My new and fragile identity – one that managed to survive the initial shock of bereavement – made use of such modernist artworks as a kind of crude armature; something to build myself around. My partner and I met as students studying the History of Art, and we maintained our love of modern art and design throughout our relationship. As such, after her passing, it felt like the works we admired and the principles of creativity we lived by were an intermediary; something left behind that still joined us, that kept her presence alive and gave me inspiration to move forward. It was almost as though the image served as a channel to hear her in spirit, a medium for her to find her way into my words. At the core of her beliefs was that art, including poetry, had the power to alchemise, to recover beauty from tragedy or disaster. That for me, if it can be accomplished, is the apex of meaning. I suspect it’s an idea that carried through from her inter-generational trauma – since her ancestors were victims of the Holocaust. If there’s been devastating loss – and that was also the case for her – there’s often a greater urgency in such individuals to find meaning, to make things make sense, given the risk of meaning collapsing into despair and nihilism. I’m again reminded here of Dostoyevsky and his statement that ‘beauty will save the world’. Since it’s what she would have wanted for me – to find redemption through art – I do my best to embody her wish, while also ‘resurrecting’ her in and through my poems. With all this, there’s also an echo of how Modernism itself, through its succession of -isms, was a glorious and in some ways failed attempt to fill the void – after Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is ‘dead’.        

PB: What is the significance of so many of the poems being “after (name)”, one being “before”, and another “alongside”?

PW:
As some readers will already know, the convention in ekphrasis (writing about artworks) is to use the epigraph ‘after’ under the title of the poem. This suggests a temporal stance, writing a poem in response to an image or object; that is, after the viewing. For others, it might also gesture towards the primacy of the originary work. As a challenge to this, my PhD project, developing other poets and writing practices over the last two decades or so, was in part an exploration of how ekphrasis can be more dynamic, emphasise process, collaboration, and a reciprocal exchange. Therefore, my poems at times were generated in situ, while in the gallery, where my experience with the artwork felt mutual – the image influencing me just as much as I was ‘representing’ it. To signify this two-way process, I’ve occasionally used an alternative epigraph, such as ‘alongside’. Other times, when the artwork was anticipated or imagined (ahead of, say, a gallery visit), and ‘seen’ in the mind’s eye, I’ve used the epigraph ‘before’. Exploring ‘beforeness’, I found support in the criticism of Thom Donovan and Lesley Harrison, who likewise argue that ekphrasis does not have to occur after the viewing; instead, it can precede it: the latter referring to this as ‘reverse ekphrasis’. What this also does is unsettle the idea of the poet in a state of rivalry or competition with the image; someone who might assume, perhaps unconsciously, a position of dominance or mastery over the artwork – the image traditionally seen as fixed, silent, and feminine. 

PB: Once they have read your book, what do you hope the reader will leave with?

PW:
As always, above all, I hope they’ll be moved by the poems. That’s what I always look for. I’ve had people say that my poems elicited tears, or they were emotive in another way, and that always feels like the greatest achievement – far more than accolades or the book’s perceived status. I find that awards or prizes mean less to me the older I get. Now, it’s about making an emotional connection with readers. I also hope that the book, in some way, resonates with the grief journey of others – and perhaps supports belief in the idea that experiences like grief or trauma can be worked through and written about. Art and literature are often partial and inadequate on their own; however, the kind of processes I’ve demonstrated – utilising abstract and modernist images as a conduit – can be seen as a possible, if somewhat fragile, bridge towards recovery and rebirth. As many therapists know, when we speak (or write), and articulate what’s so far been unspeakable, it can be healing.

Festschrift Penelope Shuttle

I’m looking for writers who have something to say about the work of Penelope Shuttle. What has been her influence on your work? What is inspirational about it? Also, academic essays. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to pay any contributors. Deadline is 7th Feb 2026.

You are invited to contribute to this celebratory Festschrift dedicated to Penelope Shuttle — poet, mentor, and imaginative force. Your reflections, memories, critical insights, or creative responses will form a rich tribute to her enduring impact.I am preparing a questions, prompts for you to select a few that resonate most with you. Your response can take any form: essay, anecdote, poem, letter, or hybrid.Please tell me below whether you would be interested in receiving these questions?