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The Poets 

Mike Barlow • Terese Coe • Ralph Culver • Greg Freeman • Katherine Gallagher • Ann GibsonJenny Hockey • Mark Holihan • Martha Landeman • Sarah Lawson • Gil Learner • Maggie Mackay • Kathy Miles • Michael Penny • Karen Petersen • Estill Pollock • Patrick Davidson Roberts •  Mark Roper • Bob Saxton • Penny Sharman • Myra Schneider • Finola Scott • John Short • Patrick Slevin • Sam Smith • Paul Stephenson • Anne Symons • Victoria Twomey • Susan Utting • Robin Lindsay Wilson •  Rodney Wood • Martin Zarrop

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Previous Poetry

THW27: September 5, 2022 • THW26: June 6, 2022  • THW25: March 6, 2022 • THW24: December 3, 2021 • THW23: • THW22: June 6, 2021  •  THW21: March 8, 2021 • THW20: December 4, 2020 •THW19: September 5, 2020 • THW18: May 4, 2020 …

I used to think I was really good at splitting myself up to do lots of different projects at once. Turns out I’m not, really. If I can, I much prefer being completely involved in one project at a time. Right now I am fully invested in the non fiction book, I’m walking it, I’m talking it, I’m dreaming it, I have lost myself in it and it is a completely wonderful sensation. To be completely obsessed, completely in the work is where I always aim to be with every project. It’s part of being a writer for me; that deep dive into the thing I’m writing about. Part of my research involves walking, so out I go in all weathers, walking the local landscape, taking photographs, making notes, absorbing the land so that I can then put it onto the page. I’m sort of…

For Paul Brookes’ challenge.

Our small town hit the national news yesterday for all the worst reasons—a fourteen-year old schoolgirl from the collège was abducted and murdered on Friday. The police arrested her killer within four hours of the girl’s mother sounding the alarm, but it was already too late.

Nowhere is safe for girls or women to walk alone. Yesterday 80,000 women marched to protest against our political leaders’ lack of interest in the crimes perpetrated against 51% of the population. It’s 2022 not 1022, surely time for women’s rights to be taken seriously.

Small town Sunday

We walked beneath the heavy clouds
en deuil beneath the spitting tearful rain,
in the tolling wind we trod a pall of leaves.

Herons called, untidy flocks
of cormorants black as priests, stilts
in the river water, egrets statue-white,

and through the heavy tolling sky,
a single gull headed for the…

This is a first for the website, a drop in by a poet published by the fabulous Emma Press! Welcome, Valerie Bence.

Thank you Nigel for this opportunity to reflect on my writing and to look at Press me in peat from my latest Emma Press pamphlet Overlap.

After a career as a librarian and researcher, I finished a very dry PhD in my late 50’s and wanted to see if I had a creative thought in my head – so I undertook a couple of online creative writing courses. After the second the tutor (a poet) told me to forget fiction and move to poetry. This was a revelation and six months later I was on a poetry MA at MMU. A year’s mentoring resulted in my first pamphlet published by Cinnamon Press Falling in love with a dead man (2019) rooted in my MA final…