this  is the link

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/morag-smith-spoil?fbclid=IwAR0aMNZOoIKgql0pIKtSrsE1Y50rfuERQ7IT1s_HsEeMXtikCapNBzv5ero

-Morag Smith

is a Cornish poet, painter, writer, and performer. She graduated in 2020 with a first in Creative Writing from Falmouth University, winning a prize for her dissertation. In 2018 she won the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, Shorelines competition. Her pamphlet, Spoil, was published by Broken Sleep Books in October 2021. Her poetry is published in various literary journals including International Times, as well as the eco-anthology, Warming! As a New Traveller she brought her children up close to nature, in trucks, caravans, and houses. She writes about her experiences, about our ravaged landscape, and bears witness to the poverty of British people. At the moment she is publishing a book of poetry about plastic pollution in our oceans, a collaboration with artist Jasmine Davies, and the Clean Ocean Sailing charity.

The Interview

Q.4: How important is form in your poetry?

I write without punctuation so form is essential to me as a way of giving the reader the rhythm of the poem. I am also a visual artist, for me, how the poetry looks on the page is important. I use line break, stanzas, space, and shape, to drive and guide a person through the poem.

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More answers to follow

-Jane Greer

published and edited Plains Poetry Journal in the 80s and 90s. Harry Duncan’s Cummington Press published her first poetry collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day, in 1986. Lambing Press published her second collection, Love like a Conflagration, in 2020 and will publish her third in 2022. Greer lives in North Dakota. 

Lambing Press:

Love Like a Conflagration

Amazon:

The Interview:

Q: 4: Australian poet, Les Murray, who was also Catholic, saw nature as the embodiment of God’s presence on earth. How do you see nature through your faith?

God is supremely loving, good, creative, and generous. Nature—from galaxies to subatomic particles and everything in between—is God’s creation. Nature is a proof of God, revealing him but not fully representing him (just as my poem is proof of my existence and reveals me but doesn’t fully represent me). There is broad, deep, universal order in nature, and everything is related. Only a Creator could make that happen. 

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More answers tomorrow.

-Sarah Westcott

grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this year. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

Q:5: What do you find it easiest to write in, first, second or third person, and why?

This completely varies with the poem. My initial freewrites are often in the first person but what a slippery creature the self is!

How can I represent ‘I’? Perhaps it can never be a whole — always a fragment, a snapshot, a metaphor. I like the directness of tone in the second person address, the intimacy of it especially in epistolary form. Sometimes I like to write through the natural world to access a first person perspective –  to sidle quietly up to it before it startles and runs away. The use of third person for me tends to tip me towards prose or short fiction. I am not sure why. Something to do with the immediacy of accessing the raw material, I think.

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The best place to buy a signed copy is to contact her directly (send a DM on twitter) or email Sarah.westcott@tiscali.co.uk

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More answers tomorrow.

-Sarah Westcott

grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this year. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

Q:4. How important is form in your poetry ?

It depends on the poem – I listen to it and feel it. Each poem finds its final form, or the form shows itself, through editing and reading aloud.  Formal form is something I would like to become more confident with. I teach it but I don’t necessarily feel any sense of managing it very well it when I write myself – I imagine it must be a little like riding a horse, reining it in and getting it gallop at different points. I feel I need muscles and experience that I don’t have yet. So when I write in strict form the poems can feel unrealised. I need more practice. I admire Hannah Lowe and Jacqui Saphra’s formal fluidity and deftness. It is like they can pick up an instrument and play it.

I like thinking of the space around the poem as a kind of living humming forcefield or a kind of skin which we pierce with text. This gives the space around the poem more reverence and helps shape the lines and line endings, the shape and where the breath falls.  

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The best place to buy a signed copy is to contact her directly (send a DM on twitter) or email Sarah.westcott@tiscali.co.uk

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More answers tomorrow.

-Jane Greer

published and edited Plains Poetry Journal in the 80s and 90s. Harry Duncan’s Cummington Press published her first poetry collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day, in 1986. Lambing Press published her second collection, Love like a Conflagration, in 2020 and will publish her third in 2022. Greer lives in North Dakota. 

Lambing Press:

Love Like a Conflagration

Amazon:

The Interview:

Q: 3: How does your religion inspire your poetry?

My Catholic faith encompasses everything I believe about reality. My perception is Catholic (at least I try to keep it Catholic) as I consider God, nature, humans, sin, suffering, redemption, sacrament, time, death, and love. My poetry comes from my perception of reality; that perception is drawn from my faith. And I think this must be true for every artist. 

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More answers tomorrow.

-Dr. David Russell Mosley

is a poet and theologian living in Washington state. When he’s not teaching or writing, David enjoys getting lost in the woods, drinking a nice scotch, and smoking a pipe. His debut book of poetry, The Green Man, is out now with Resource Publications.

Q: 3. How important is religion in your poetry?

Religion is essential in my poetry. This may seem obvious given I have a sequence of poems about the days of creation and several others on the saints, but it’s more than that. All of my poems flow out of my understanding of reality, which is informed by my Catholic faith. This isn’t to say that one must be religious in general or Catholic in particular to enjoy my poems. By no means. But, it is the framework out of which I do everything I do, not least the writing of poetry. My faith tells me, as Hopkins once wrote, that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” If this is the case, then every nook and cranny of creation shimmers with the divine. This is something I try to bring out in my poetry.

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Links:

Publisher: https://wipfandstock.com/9781666703672/the-green-man/

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Green-Man-David-Russell-Mosley/dp/1666703672/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9781666703672&qid=1636732209&qsid=145-6241124-6410460&sr=8-1&sres=1666703672&srpt=ABIS_BOOK

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Green-Man-David-Russell-Mosley/dp/1666703672/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1636732240&sr=8-1

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more from David tomorrow.

this  is the link

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/morag-smith-spoil?fbclid=IwAR0aMNZOoIKgql0pIKtSrsE1Y50rfuERQ7IT1s_HsEeMXtikCapNBzv5ero

-Morag Smith

is a Cornish poet, painter, writer, and performer. She graduated in 2020 with a first in Creative Writing from Falmouth University, winning a prize for her dissertation. In 2018 she won the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, Shorelines competition. Her pamphlet, Spoil, was published by Broken Sleep Books in October 2021. Her poetry is published in various literary journals including International Times, as well as the eco-anthology, Warming! As a New Traveller she brought her children up close to nature, in trucks, caravans, and houses. She writes about her experiences, about our ravaged landscape, and bears witness to the poverty of British people. At the moment she is publishing a book of poetry about plastic pollution in our oceans, a collaboration with artist Jasmine Davies, and the Clean Ocean Sailing charity.

The Interview

Q.3: Why is history/herstory important in your poetry

Whatever a poem articulates has its own history/herstory, the reader, in turn, brings to the reading their own experiences. Every event is viewed through the lens of our conditioning. Till we can understand it it colours everything. Poetry unpicks and interprets, helps us look at the past more realistically, more honestly, momentarily putting us inside the story.

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More answers to follow