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Neil Elder’s collection, The Space Between Us was published by Cinnamon Press in 2018, having won their debut collection prize. His pamphlet Codes of Conduct was shortlisted for a Saboteur Award. Other works include And The House Watches On and Being Present. His latest work is Like This was published by 4Word Press. Neil lives in Harrow, N.W. London.

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Review • Poems

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Like This by Neil Elder £5.99 4Word Press 9782490653119

Neil Elder’s poems have a clarity and directness that’s sorely missing in much of today’s poetry. Yet that’s not to be confused with simplicity. The poet takes everyday moments and charges them with a uniquely reflective lyricism and subversive playfulness. Rarer still, he has an almost mystic-like inner eye: the ability to peer through the mundane and see the edges of the world. Many of the poems radiate a quiet melancholy, but almost…

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SCRIBES IN THE WOODS
Early Irish Monastic Poetry
by Tim Dwyer

Irish poetry has been considered the earliest vernacular poetry written in Europe – that is, poetry written in a native language. A number of these poems have been compared by Meyer (1913/1994) with haiku, having an unforced immediacy, and blending of the spirit of nature and humanity. As in haiku and early Chinese poetry, this is conveyed through essential, brief impressions, centered on words and phrases more than sentences. More than a thousand years ago, these scribes discovered a key to great poetry- essential words to reflect experience difficult to convey through language. If one elaborates with unnecessary and distracting words to try to pin down experience, then the experience is lost. As Emily Dickinson noted, poetry conveys Life at a slant.

Although not all early Irish poems are brief, many of them are ten lines or less…

IDEAS ARE WINGLESS FLIERSIn the dark times 
Will there also be singing? 
Yes, there will also be singing. 
About the dark times.
 
-- Bertolt Brecht
 
 
A knife slices
organs
 
a bullet
maims
kills.
 
Physicality
can be contained
within the dark dungeons
but barbed walls
cannot imprison
the mind.
 
Assaults
mar the body.
 
Torture, murders,
disappearances
cannot break
human spirit.
 
Words escape
censors
the SS, Gestapo,
religious zealots
book burnings
book bans
decrees

knife/bomb attacks
and, escaped words
sprout in the wastelands,
 
each word further
cross-pollinates
 
a rich harvest
delivered!
 
Words
can never be decimated
lost
archived
forgotten
 
always come back
as spectral beings
for fresh haunting
of the
totalitarian states.

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Sunil Sharmais an academic and writer with 23 books published—some solo and joint. Edits the online monthly journalSetu.

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PLEASE NOTE:ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS…

http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/poetry-by-lindsey-heatherly

Lindsey is a Pushcart nominated writer with work in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Emrys Journal and more. She is a nonfiction editor for RED FEZ and lives with her daughter in Upstate South Carolina. Find her online athttps://r3dwillow.wixsite.com/rydanmardseyoron Twitter: @rydanmardsey.

What does your memory smell like?

Cigarettes and freshly mown grass. I remember sitting with my grandmother on the back deck, ashes an inch long hanging from the cigarette in her mouth. That smell has often been a comfort to me. I’ve lived in South Carolina my entire life, and the smell of freshly cut grass is a sign that the seasons are turning, and life is continuing. It is one of the constants that I have learned to count on. Change around here is minimal, so you learn to pick up on the small things. The small things make a big impact.

What do you want your…

Marie Marchand is Poet Laureate of Ellensburg, WA. Her poetry has been published inCatamaran Literary Reader,California Quarterly,Paterson Literary Review,Tiny Seed Journal,High Plains Register, and numerous chapbooks. She has two books of poetry:Pink Sunset Luminaries(2018) andGifts to the Attentive(2022).Her poetry has been recognized by the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, Wyoming Writers Prize, and Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest. Marie is a mental health advocate with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She is founder of the new collaborative poetry spaceMaitri Poetrywhose mission is to advance loving-kindness and peace in our world through poetry. You can read Marie’s work at mishiepoet.com and follow her on Twitter @mishiepoet and @maitripoetry.

What does your memory smell like?

Sweet summer apricots, the snap of fresh greenbeans, and blooming alfalfa fields waving in the…

Never Mind That Now

James Diaz is a poet striving for light in upstate New York. They are the author of two full length books of poetry, This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Rust + Moth, Bear Creek Gazette, Resurrection Mag, Line Rider Press, Cobra Milk and Misery Tourism. 

1.What does your memory smell like?

For as long as I can remember, I called itthe North. I grew up down south, in a not so happy place, but the memory of the wind around my Grandmother’s lakeside house, in the woods of upstate New York, it was something, I couldn’t quite tell you what, that I would every now and again detect a memory-trace of in my unhappy places…

Two Blackbirds on a Hill

During the walk on a frosted morning,

When my breath vapoured out coldness,

And fingers became numb to the touch,

There was two blackbirds on a hill-

Poised upon a rickety farmer`s fence,

In dignified stillness.

The blackbirds plucked thebriars

and brambles,pregnant with blackberries.

It mattered not to me,the myth nor

The foretelling of their presence, as

Long shadows traced thetelling of an

Impending arrival of a late guest.

Dusk readied as I walkedtowards

The two blackbirds on a hill.

As this is only the second of these guest posts , here`s a quick introduction to the format. We start off the guest posts with a poem and five questions to introduce the poet. Then the poet, in this case Robin, can either present themselves or send me the poems with the answered questions. There will be three poems in each guest post, the idea…

Read The Mercy Hour here:

Taylor Byas

Taylor Byas is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is now a second year PhD student and Yates scholar at the University of Cincinnati, and an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus. She was the 1st place winner of both the Poetry Super Highway and the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests. Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is forthcoming from Variant Lit in the summer of 2021. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Glass, Iron Horse Literary Review, Hobart, Frontier Poetry, SWWIM, TriQuarterly, and others.@TaylorByas3

What does your memory smell like?

My memory smells like Luster’s Products Pink Hair Lotion. My parents used to use it in my hair when I was younger and I can conjure up that smell at any moment. It makes me feel tended to and cared for.

Paul Ings was born in Bournemouth, UK, in 1971, and has spent the last 30 years in the Czech Republic working in teaching and translation including a course at the University of West Bohemia on English Literature Written by Non-native Speakers.

His poetry has been published in magazines including The Reader, Magma, The Interpreter’s House, Ink Sweat and Tears, Salzburg Poetry Review, South, etc., and in the anthologiesHair Raising(Nine Pens Press),The Joy of Living(Dreich),You’ve Got So Many Machines Richard!(Broken Sleep),Hildegard(Poetry on the Lake),Eternal(Hammond House),Cornwall(Palores Publications), and he was a joint winner of the Exmoor Society poetry competition in 2019. There have also been translations of Czech poetry (BODY Literature) and reviews in the Czech journal of international literature Plav.

His first collection, One Week, One Span of Human Life, was published by Alien Buddha Press on

Plein air

Find the right place and everything will come to you –Judith da Fano

The ground has been roughly applied

then smoothed by a day’s rain. Yesterday

would have been impossible. Imagine

walking over the surface and the brush

is a journey.

All morning I step over bluebells,

wind flowers, under tall sunlight angling

thin pines eager to strike open

the golden view of the Pikes

from the river’s edge.

Smell the petrichor – earth, moss,

tender ferns, ripe cones. No-one walks by,

no-one is asking anything of me but myself.

Don’t cheat. Don’t rely on guesswork. Observe.

Never make a mark without first looking –

basics learned with the tap of a ruler on my wrist.

Palette laid, I brush in woodland air.

A heron lands, sheep graze into view.

Sap green, umber, cadmium yellow

flows brilliantly through the scene.

From A Window of Passing Light