I have two new poems coming out in The North magazine, should be very soon. In the same issue, I’ve reviewed poetry collections by Maria Taylor, Katherine Stansfield and Jackie Wills. I’ve also had an acceptance for a poem in 14 magazine which will be published later this year. Many rejections which I won’t list […]

July Update — Josephine Corcoran

Born in Dundee in 1961, W.N. Herbert was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. His doctorate on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid was published as To Circumjack MacDiarmid (1992). He returned to Scotland from Oxford in 1993, taking writer-in-residence posts in Dumfries and Galloway, and then in Moray, before becoming Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Newcastle […]

Essential Mourning: David Hackbridge-Johnson on W.N. Herbert’s ‘The Wreck of the Fathership’ — The High Window

https://fb.watch/6va8um82Cp/

-Su Zi (originally published in New American Writing 16)

-Karl Knights (who says “

on the topic of ableism and so on, I got genuine hate mail after publishing this poem in the last issue of The Dark Horse. People were especially infuriated by that last stanza. I didn’t know poetry could still produce hate mail.

The Vanishing Act, Magician

(In memory of the magician Uday Shankar Saha)

The white mice from his handkerchief
shivers with the freedom, as if
they remember being nonexistent.

The flash, smoke and mirrors,
sorcerer obliterated,
the stage waits for the trick,
and we think we know the punchlines
beforehand. One little father
holds the hand of his big son,
ready to leave the proceedings.

The son looks at one mice near his feet.
The faint noise is a sight now. A sleight of fate,
a magic rolls on, the magician, gone, exists
as the stage, audience waiting and leaving,
boxes and handkerchiefs, saw and mice.

Mourning For a Running Mate

(In memory of Revati Gore )

The other day
song birds flew
free above the cityscape,

and we recall that
more than anything they
ever sang; oh yes,

we recall you, my friend,
a fellow runner preparing
for the marathon in the weekend.

Sweating smiles
on the jokes
never cracked. The best of the laughs.

We cannot remember
how you withered;
no way, you quit a run

run for no medal,
that flight of the birds
above the city cage.

-All by Annest Gwilym from her collection “What The Owl Taught Me”.

There’s No Such Thing as a Wazzock

There’s no such thing as a Wazzock Mum said
As she turned the light off and tucked me in bed
Those shadows that shake must be all in my head
There’s no such thing as a Wazzock

There’s no such thing as a Wazzock you see
The creature that loves to eat children for tea
Though in the dark four eyes are following me
There’s no such thing as a Wazzock

There’s no such thing as a Wazzock it’s true
That’s why you’ll not find them in cages in zoos
It’s rumoured they’re furry and indigo blue
There’s no such thing as a Wazzock

There’s no such thing as a Wazzock I know
As tall as a tree from its hat to its toe
With horns of a rhino and claws of a crow
There’s no such thing as a Wazzock

There’s no such thing as a Wazzock it seems
So I can sleep safely and have pleasant dreams
Why would I be woken by squawking and screams?
When there’s no such thing as a Wazzock

-Neal Zetter (from his collection “Porcupine“)

The Beast

Waiting,
watchful
in it’s lair
teeth glinting
in the darkness,
the rhythm of its breathing
broken by the raucous
laughter of children outside.

We need only to glance at it

but when we try to scrub
its image
from memory,
only then do we learn
what it is to escape.

-Roshni Beeharry (she says “inspired in part by an image of the minotaur but in my head it represents a more modern day “monster”, predatorial adults when I look at what I actually wrote and edited since…so perhaps…not fantastical beast but inspired by one and imaginary..)

The Loogaroo

By stealth of night,
she knocks on doors
in her guise of old woman
in search of blood

She stops to count the grains
of rice
left outside by the wary,
those warned of her tricks
by anxious grandmothers.

Her skin is spangled
from the Devil Tree;
an empty husk
gourd-like
she steals blood
for the Devil,
in exchange for
magical powers.

Sunrise chases her away,
but deals with the Devil
still need to be paid.

-Roshni Beeharry (She says of it: “inspired by a the Carribean folklore story of the soucouyant , “a shape shifting” vampire like creature who masquerades as an old woman by day…stories like these travelled to French colonies like Mauritius, where my parents are from, so I recall my Mum telling us about the Loogaroo, the other name for this creature I discovered when I looked into it recently!) 

“Bleb” by Sanjeev Sethi

One of the great positives for me when reading Sanjeev is the opportunity to increase my vocabulary. In each poem there is one or more words for which I need a dictionary. This is excellent because it puts the emphasis on meaning. This is especially true of “Bleb”, his new book out with Dreich. To me the poems deal with the separateness of people, of the reader and writer, the writer to the poems they write. Sanjeev calls these “wee poems” but they get larger with each reading. The first poem in the collection:

Speaks of the outside coming in. “Words cycle towards” him. He is “the doc on duty”. “the baby” is “the first draft” needs medical care. The creation of something outside himself that needs nurturing. This is one of Sanjeev’s major themes in the book. How poems become independent have a life of their own, but also deaths of their own too. The final poem:

Finishes with a sense of the positive “fresh urgencies”. He sees words as “empirical drills” to “decipher” the world and his relationship with it. I cannot recommend this work highly enough. He takes us back to the running track of the first poem. His poems are that “raw force” that “flow with fresh urgencies.”

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. At £3.00 it is a must read.

‘Bleb’ SANJEEV SETHI Wee book