I simply love this book and could quote from it endlessly. Split into nine sections it’s playful yet serious and seriously playful at the same time. These are poems which sing and suggest, slip from idea to idea, confuse your thought processes yet delight the eye and the brain with an abundance of energy, skill and sheer brilliance. There is rhyme and assonance in abundance, all the traditional tricks of the trade yet done in such a way as not to overstate the case and even when this is the case to do it with such bravado and gusto that the reader is helplessly in thrall. Here, for example, are the first and final stanzas in the opening poem ‘Time is of the effervescence’:
was shortlisted for the Erbacce 2020 Poetry Prize. He is the author of “Shop Talk” (Penniless Press, 2019), “No Refunds” (Alien Buddha Press, 2020) and “Working Class Zero” (Dreich Publications, 2021).
Paul Tanner
is barely qualified for minimum wage. He’s been earning it, and writing about it, for too long. His star sign is Libido. Hobbies include pillage and colouring in. “
The Interview
When and why did you start writing poetry?
Maybe tomorrow. And why the hell not, eh?
2. Who introduced you to poetry?
If I could remember, I’d be doing time.
3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?
I try not to be.
4. What is your daily writing routine?
Hiding in the work cubicle, scrawling on bog paper, as one of the supervisors bangs on the door.
5. What subjects motivate you to write?
It’s revenge. Don’t believe the moral posers claiming they’re doing it for you, or this or that group – it’s always revenge.
6. What is your work ethic?
It isn’t.
7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence your work today?
Hemingway: Edit.
Irvine Welsh: Be honest.
Celine: Be even more honest.
Chuck Palahniuk: Have fun.
Bret Easton Ellis: Edit more. Be even more honest. Have even more fun.
Kafka: You’re not paranoid, you’re right.
Orwell: Actually, you are paranoid … but you’re still right.
Bukowski: Don’t try.
The Fantes: Keep trying.
Morrissey: Look around.
John Lydon: Look around.
Burroughs: Don’t look.
8. Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?
All of us. None of us. I don’t know. Fuck it: let’s go down fighting, you crazy bastards!
9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?
I don’t know and I don’t want to know.
10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
Write. As obnoxious as it sounds, just write. And if you can’t, or won’t, then congratulations: you’re not a writer.
11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.
About 4,683 poems chewing through the inside of my skull, like an army of death moths trapped in a dusty old light bulb. You know, same as usual.
Sometimes it is just a flap of wings in a lonely meadow, or a child’s shoes and socks left by a pond
Sometimes it is the intensity of darkness or the emptiness in the kitchen at harvest
Maybe the laughter ascending from the street below or the ‘stepford wives’ promenading past with their pugs;
the elation of cheering crowds at a football match, the vicar’s wife fraternising with the village elite…
Whatever triggers it, you instantly know, that lonely ghost in the empty chair is you,
as though you are marked out with a blood-red bindi…. folk turn away, rejecting the discomfort of your grief
The world tumbles to wrong conclusions and your sealed lips shout ‘I am still here!’
You cannot fight the inevitability of it; you ask yourself why grief is such taboo….
Sometimes all it takes is the wind kissing your hair, the cyclist turning to smile as he pedals past,
moonlight catching the svelte stem of your wine glass, or an unexpected call from a complete stranger…..
Just small things, singular, unremarkable, yet they have the power to transform your world…and you are grateful
First published in The Blue Nib journal
-Margaret Royall
Bios And Links
-Barbara Leonhard’s
work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, PhoebeMD: Medicine & Poetry, among others. Barbara won prizes and awards for her poetry in the anthology Well Versed 2021 and Spillwords, where she was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. You can follow Barbara on her blog site, https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.com.
-Rachel Deering
lives in Bath with a cat. She writes poetry and takes the occasional photo whilst walking.
-Dana Clark-Millar
Over the past 2 years Dana has taken a deep dive into the world of haiku. When her fingers are not occupied counting out syllables, she is using them to weed and plant her garden. You can also find her cooking, canning and preserving foods, birdwatching, taking photos, playing out on the trails or enjoying a book while her 3 dogs and 2 cats attempt to out-cute one another.
-Cy Forrest
is state-educated, Manchester, now living in Wiltshire. MA Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Elvis at the Golden Shovel appeared in February’s issue of The Honest Ulsterman, the first in a set of four sestinas using end words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ twenty-four word poem, The Pool Players, Seven at the Golden Shovel. Billy Collins longlisted another in the set of four for the 2021 Fish Prize. Poems have been placed at Icefloe Press and here in The Wombwell Rainbow. Two are due to appear in Stand Magazine later this year. A full collection reached stage two in The North’s March 2021 open call.
-Louise Longson
cleared enough space in her spare room and head to start writing ‘properly’ during lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Poetry Shed and others. She is a winner of Dreich’s chapbook competition 2021 with Hanging Fire. A qualified psychotherapist, she works with historic trauma and the physical and emotional distresses caused by chronic loneliness. Lives with an orange cat and a silver Yorkshireman. In her head, sky is always blue, grass always green, leaves always golden. Needs to get out more.
Twitter @LouisePoetical
-Gillian Winn
is a mature poet, currently studying Creative Writing with the Open University. She worked as a nurse for the NHS for 40 years. She lives in North Yorkshire.
-Teresa Durran
was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.
She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.
-Sue Finch’s
debut collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of online magazines. She lives with her wife in North Wales. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. You can often find her on Twitter @soopoftheday.
–Margaret Royall
has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.
-S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.
A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.
After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.
You know you’ve enjoyed a poetry pamphlet when you’re left wanting more. That was certainly my experience when I read debut talent, Julie McNeill’s Ragged Rainbows, for this is a compelling, reflective and ultimately optimistic collection of poems that prompts us to consider the challenges faced by the world around us and to think about our response to the issues she explores.
The world in Ragged Rainbows is precarious. It is beset by climate change, which threatens our existence to such an extent that the most the poet can hope for is to ‘leave,/ a smattering of trees,/ a slither of clean air/ and a tiny pocket-full of hope/ for my children.’ (Raising Environmentalists). It is a place where the cost of independence for women is sexual humiliation by misogynistic men, when the exchange for a few ‘coins’ in a fifteen year old girl’s pocket is ‘a friend of…
Published May 14th 2018 for International Dylan Thomas Day. @DyddDylanDay
I’m grateful to the first of my heroes. To Dylan Thomas I proffer my love. For making me see the wonder of words… Because of that I can’t thank him enough.
The poem’s more about me than Dylan Thomas…
1969 ANNO DYLANI
“To begin at the beginning…” he said,
Often supposed to be the best of starts;
But my being sent to technical school,
Would likely stifle a love of the arts.
No aptitude for wood or metalwork;
Out of place when it came to surveying
And Geometrical Machine Drawing.
Did Mum pick the wrong school? I’m just saying…
I might have supposed that Mr Beddows
Was some kind of agent provocateur;
But at our school, boys had to do German
And couldn’t do French until the fifth year.
Working in a school run on old-school rules, Our new English…
This book is a quartet of slow, accumulative, long prose poems that touch on landscape, personal experience, geography, and philosophy. Sectioned and/or paragraphed, they gradually build up encounters with ‘Landscapes. Subtle shiftings of reality.’ These shiftings come from attention to detail, consideration of change, the seasons, the weather, how the light falls, and of how humans engage with the world around them.
Moorhead is interested in her own place in things, and inplaceitself, willing to be both scientific and emotional, rational and speculative, and to grapple with the unknown, in an attempt to allow ‘this existence to be full’. This fullness of experience, of course, means dealing with ups and downs, winter and summer, light and dark, the desired-for and the unwelcome. Death and mortality are part of nature, as is longing, absence, memory and anticipation; our own stories make sense of our lives, and ‘[f]ables frame the…
My thin reflection haunts the black- spotted mirror.
I have become dusk-scented; a moth-pollinated bloom.
The brush of wings jars against my face. Their kiss is made of dust.
I am submerged, sunk into this obscure room, left behind a closed door.
In my dreams, I travel far through spiral galaxies,
lighted by the moon.
-Louise Longson (She says: This poem features in the upcoming pamphlet Songs from the Witch Bottle: cytoplasmic variations by Louise Longson, Alien Buddha Press 2022)
Bullies
Meet in Geoff’s house to hear Led Zep’s “Presence“ on hifi in Seventy Six, Rush’s “A Farewell To Kings” Seventy Seven. Keen to guess how they would complete Cygnus.
Stood by rickety fence dividing Shaw Lane Cricket ground and school field catching Top Twenty, on uncertain reception raw on Mick’s smuggled medium wave playing
transistor radio, despair when Kate Bush Wuthering Heights reaches number one we wail like she does in Seventy Eight. As I sit at front of all classes teachers gone
they goad others to pelt me with screwed up paper, board rubbers until staff turn up.
-Paul Brookes
Bios And Links
-Barbara Leonhard’s
work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, PhoebeMD: Medicine & Poetry, among others. Barbara won prizes and awards for her poetry in the anthology Well Versed 2021 and Spillwords, where she was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. You can follow Barbara on her blog site, https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.com.
-Rachel Deering
lives in Bath with a cat. She writes poetry and takes the occasional photo whilst walking.
-Dana Clark-Millar
Over the past 2 years Dana has taken a deep dive into the world of haiku. When her fingers are not occupied counting out syllables, she is using them to weed and plant her garden. You can also find her cooking, canning and preserving foods, birdwatching, taking photos, playing out on the trails or enjoying a book while her 3 dogs and 2 cats attempt to out-cute one another.
-Cy Forrest
is state-educated, Manchester, now living in Wiltshire. MA Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Elvis at the Golden Shovel appeared in February’s issue of The Honest Ulsterman, the first in a set of four sestinas using end words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ twenty-four word poem, The Pool Players, Seven at the Golden Shovel. Billy Collins longlisted another in the set of four for the 2021 Fish Prize. Poems have been placed at Icefloe Press and here in The Wombwell Rainbow. Two are due to appear in Stand Magazine later this year. A full collection reached stage two in The North’s March 2021 open call.
-Louise Longson
cleared enough space in her spare room and head to start writing ‘properly’ during lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Poetry Shed and others. She is a winner of Dreich’s chapbook competition 2021 with Hanging Fire. A qualified psychotherapist, she works with historic trauma and the physical and emotional distresses caused by chronic loneliness. Lives with an orange cat and a silver Yorkshireman. In her head, sky is always blue, grass always green, leaves always golden. Needs to get out more.
Twitter @LouisePoetical
-Gillian Winn
is a mature poet, currently studying Creative Writing with the Open University. She worked as a nurse for the NHS for 40 years. She lives in North Yorkshire.
-Teresa Durran
was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.
She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.
-Sue Finch’s
debut collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of online magazines. She lives with her wife in North Wales. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. You can often find her on Twitter @soopoftheday.
–Margaret Royall
has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.
-S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.
A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.
After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.
The Wounded Angel – a Tritina After the painting by Hugo Simberg
They carry their precious cargo to safety, bandaged, wounded; fallen from heavenly realms, received by the rain-soaked earth. Dejected, she weeps in silence. Loneliness crushes her to the core.
She cannot move her lips, speak of the incident; pain enforces silence. Her stretcher-bearers move with gentle grace, knowing she is wounded. They wonder how such a holy child could have fallen unseen on earth,
when no one saw a parachute fail to open, saw her hit the cold earth. No gunfire audible, fields offering up no secrets, holding silence, in which she lay alone, her sacred body shaken, wounded.
She clasps a bunch of snowdrops, trusts them to heal her wounded wing, trusts Earth to keep her safe, hold mortal silence.
-Margaret Royall
-Sarah Reeson
Loneliness is a powerful thing to write about. No one hears even if you shout no one reads there is doubt Loneliness is a killing thing lump in the throat numb and afloat feet heart sinking and missing the beat Loneliness is a depressive thing It comes in a day when a dear one is indifferent and far away with reasons unknown what can one say- Loneliness is a lonesome thing it stays with the lonely and makes them sing when they cannot fly with their broken wings. Loneliness is a powerful thing when it builds patience when it fills emptiness when it heals wounds when it shows colors when it reveals character Loneliness is a powerful thing
when it does not come once when it goes and returns when it widens distances when it cools the burns – Loneliness is the absence of response.
-Anjum Wasim Dar
No Time For Me
I wake up suddenly too many times. Sometimes I just eat packets of biscuits. One after the other. All hours are mine. I eat and sleep when I want. I exist.
No workfriends. I walk home late from nightclubs. Hear my own footsteps in the morning streets. Talking to folk exhausts me. Drink in pubs hold my pint glass empty. Endless repeat.
Afraid to get caught staring at others. I hold my head low. I’m plain wallpaper. Old mates have family life, bairns, lovers. No time for me. Invitations taper.
They are better than me. Our friendship brief. Loneliness is sometimes a form of grief.
-Paul Brookes
Bios And Links
-Barbara Leonhard’s
work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, PhoebeMD: Medicine & Poetry, among others. Barbara won prizes and awards for her poetry in the anthology Well Versed 2021 and Spillwords, where she was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. You can follow Barbara on her blog site, https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.com.
-Rachel Deering
lives in Bath with a cat. She writes poetry and takes the occasional photo whilst walking.
-Dana Clark-Millar
Over the past 2 years Dana has taken a deep dive into the world of haiku. When her fingers are not occupied counting out syllables, she is using them to weed and plant her garden. You can also find her cooking, canning and preserving foods, birdwatching, taking photos, playing out on the trails or enjoying a book while her 3 dogs and 2 cats attempt to out-cute one another.
-Cy Forrest
is state-educated, Manchester, now living in Wiltshire. MA Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Elvis at the Golden Shovel appeared in February’s issue of The Honest Ulsterman, the first in a set of four sestinas using end words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ twenty-four word poem, The Pool Players, Seven at the Golden Shovel. Billy Collins longlisted another in the set of four for the 2021 Fish Prize. Poems have been placed at Icefloe Press and here in The Wombwell Rainbow. Two are due to appear in Stand Magazine later this year. A full collection reached stage two in The North’s March 2021 open call.
-Louise Longson
cleared enough space in her spare room and head to start writing ‘properly’ during lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Poetry Shed and others. She is a winner of Dreich’s chapbook competition 2021 with Hanging Fire. A qualified psychotherapist, she works with historic trauma and the physical and emotional distresses caused by chronic loneliness. Lives with an orange cat and a silver Yorkshireman. In her head, sky is always blue, grass always green, leaves always golden. Needs to get out more.
Twitter @LouisePoetical
-Gillian Winn
is a mature poet, currently studying Creative Writing with the Open University. She worked as a nurse for the NHS for 40 years. She lives in North Yorkshire.
-Teresa Durran
was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.
She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.
-Sue Finch’s
debut collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of online magazines. She lives with her wife in North Wales. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. You can often find her on Twitter @soopoftheday.
–Margaret Royall
has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.
-S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.
A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.
After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.
In October 2021 they were nominated for the Best of the Net Award.
They enjoy living online, but also find great joy from lifting heavy weights, running and cycling in the meat-space. When not doing these, they are pursuing an ASD diagnosis on the NHS.
Loneliness an illusion – we’re always connected by threads of light dreamt and drawn – this webbing cradles our minds our hearts our souls like bones that form a whole – we’re not alone – if only we can see our connections in time and space without squinting.
-Barbara Leonhard (She says: This is an original image I created. It’s a neurographica piece.)
Not Alone Loneliness an illusion – we’re always connected by threads of light dreamt and drawn – this webbing cradles our minds our hearts our souls like bones that form a whole – we’re not alone – if only we can see our connections in time and space without squinting.
-Barbara Leonhard
Loneliness
-photo by Rachel Deering
-Sarah Reeson
The Slick Street Part of the World after AM/TRAK by Amiri Baraka
Arriving in town with a one way ticket — scream, history, love, search; need a place to eat — play here says the smiling vertical medusa: the disused telephone exchange, the basement table; it’s the slick street part of the world in more ways than one — Spanish Harlem. Sit down — done ticket; the hip band, blows hard, you stare long at the postcard art, smoke the numbers, speak the clocks, eat the meal of cultural appropriation, the tisane of petals, the foraged creation; squid ink poured over warm, smooth pebbles, on the longest day, on the year’s midsummer.
-Cy Forrest
The Loneliness of the Condemned
There was a wildness in the rage of his eyes: ‘Let’s hold hands when they tie us to the stake!’ he urged
his fellow prisoners, groaning under the whip, toiling uphill to the place of ritual sacrifice.
Sweat dripped from tormented brows, blood oozed from open wounds – a nauseous stench of burning flesh licked at quivering nostrils.
He watched the girl in the sari crossing the field below, carrying a pitcher of holy water on her shoulder
She didn’t look up at him. Her feet burned as she crossed the scorching ground, water leaking
from the cracked pitcher, dripping down her jewelled sari Innocent droplets splashing onto the ochre dirt track
He grew frantic, calling out to the condemned – They had to listen! ‘ Solidarity, brothers, Let’s hold hands. Our last stand!’
But their ears were blind, their eyes deaf, their minds numb The girl in the sari reached the edge of the field and disappeared into oblivion.
-Margaret Royall
My Bella
There for me when wacked I trudge in from work. There for me when I am ill, barely lift my head from the pillow. Lays beside my hurt. Stroke her hair she arches her back, a gift.
Now nothing calms my heart as she once did. Hollowness in my lap, no soft greeting as I arrive. No brushing my cheek. Rid of her tenderness, I dream of seeing
her once more. How will she return to me? Her tenderness is the warm non-verbal I lack from my wife. Physicality our lass balks at, and calls her daddies girl.
She was abandoned, thrown out of her home. When I don’t see her for days I’m alone.
-Paul Brookes
Bios And Links
-Barbara Leonhard’s
work is published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, PhoebeMD: Medicine & Poetry, among others. Barbara won prizes and awards for her poetry in the anthology Well Versed 2021 and Spillwords, where she was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. You can follow Barbara on her blog site, https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.com.
-Rachel Deering
lives in Bath with a cat. She writes poetry and takes the occasional photo whilst walking.
-Dana Clark-Millar
Over the past 2 years Dana has taken a deep dive into the world of haiku. When her fingers are not occupied counting out syllables, she is using them to weed and plant her garden. You can also find her cooking, canning and preserving foods, birdwatching, taking photos, playing out on the trails or enjoying a book while her 3 dogs and 2 cats attempt to out-cute one another.
-Cy Forrest
is state-educated, Manchester, now living in Wiltshire. MA Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Elvis at the Golden Shovel appeared in February’s issue of The Honest Ulsterman, the first in a set of four sestinas using end words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ twenty-four word poem, The Pool Players, Seven at the Golden Shovel. Billy Collins longlisted another in the set of four for the 2021 Fish Prize. Poems have been placed at Icefloe Press and here in The Wombwell Rainbow. Two are due to appear in Stand Magazine later this year. A full collection reached stage two in The North’s March 2021 open call.
-Louise Longson
cleared enough space in her spare room and head to start writing ‘properly’ during lockdown 2020. She is published by One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, The Poetry Shed and others. She is a winner of Dreich’s chapbook competition 2021 with Hanging Fire. A qualified psychotherapist, she works with historic trauma and the physical and emotional distresses caused by chronic loneliness. Lives with an orange cat and a silver Yorkshireman. In her head, sky is always blue, grass always green, leaves always golden. Needs to get out more.
Twitter @LouisePoetical
-Gillian Winn
is a mature poet, currently studying Creative Writing with the Open University. She worked as a nurse for the NHS for 40 years. She lives in North Yorkshire.
-Teresa Durran
was born in London and lives in Hampshire but has rarely felt less English; the blood of Celtic ancestors flows through her veins. Being the daughter of immigrants has entirely informed her world view and she has always instinctively empathised with the outsider and the ‘other’.
She writes delicate poems for fragile times because she has to. She wanders and wonders and dreams, and she is always lost in music.
-Sue Finch’s
debut collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020. Her work has also appeared in a number of online magazines. She lives with her wife in North Wales. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. You can often find her on Twitter @soopoftheday.
–Margaret Royall
has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.
-S Reeson [she/they] is 55, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.
A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.
After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019 and took part in their first ever Open Mic event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.
In October 2021 they were nominated for the Best of the Net Award.
They enjoy living online, but also find great joy from lifting heavy weights, running and cycling in the meat-space. When not doing these, they are pursuing an ASD diagnosis on the NHS.
The Wombwell Rainbow 