I’m tentatively starting this blog post by saying I’m feeling a lot better this week. It’s been two weeks and 5 days since my emergency operation, but I’ve been gradually getting back to normal for most of this week.
I’m the first person to admit I’m not the best at taking it easy but I’ve been left with little choice after my recent adventures. The strangest thing has been limiting myself to doing one, or at the most, two activities a day so I don’t get too tired. Normally, I just charge about from one thing to the other, but this level of normality is not possible yet.
Monday was supposed to be a day of working on the RD1 form, but I got distracted by a poem. It’s been sitting in my folder for a while now in first draft form, but it suddenly felt ready to be worked…
I’m hoping to be posting here at least once a month with a poem from a collection that I’ve loved. Now that my PhD is finished, I’m finally finding a bit more time to read poetry collections and I’ve read some amazing books this month. I used to post a poem every Sunday, but I can’t keep up with the pace of that any more. But I think I can keep up with posting one poem a month along with an update of what I’ve been up to.
January Freelance Life
MENTORING January has been absolutely full-on. In a normal year, January is usually a pretty quiet month in the life of a freelancer. Most literary organisations are making plans for the rest of the year – there’s not many gigs around as people recover from Christmas (or at least this is what I’ve found in…
In Darren Beaney’s ‘drop in’ last week he explained that his intention in writing Honey Dew (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020) was to produce a series of poems about his relationship with his wife, Jo, without being ‘too schmaltzy or soppy’. There’s no doubt that he succeeds, for Honey Dew is a collection that explores the many-faceted nature of love in ways that the reader can readily connect with.
All the positive phases of a love affair are here. The first awkward meeting and initial attraction (Let Your Heart Dance); the dates when this attraction grows into affection as they get to know each other (Playing Banjo on Brighton Beach, First Date Merry-Go-Round); the thrill of falling in love (Let’s Start Something We Won’t Want to Finish, Finding the Fit of Each Other, Now it Make Sense, Still Falling in Love, And She Said); the decision…
The first thing I noticed when reading Susan’s writing is the descriptive imagery, she makes you feel every emotion she feels. This is a trait in writing that I admire and her telling of loss and depression at times returns me back on imagery I rarely see outside of Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath. The poetry reads like the story of her life through the love, loss, grief, the screaming pinches in the soul that losing a parent, child, or sibling staples-in forever. She also hauntingly describes the progress of losing her sight as she has gone from a sky full of stars both sentient and still to the ones who blink out erratically til there is nothing left to burn. These are not just some poems. These are her life. Emotions are hers. When you read this collection of poetry the Emotions are yours too. “Between Sight and Blindness”…
He watches the sky’s soft edge around the earth as a brush paints familiar strokes done a million times before, burnished blues, glints of mauves on the ethereal soft palette
All he remembers is her voice, and sensations of her words worn like skeins of sonnets, woven in striking metaphors, alphabets crash like waves then recedes gently back to the blue.
Sandcastles built over years; love twisted with turrets of pain glimpses of their future, a fairy tale writ on the moist sandy beach washed away in flurries of blue and white as horizon darkens to navy.
-Leela Soma
Nightmare Storms – A Villanelle
In her dark mind towering thunderheads Better to break than to abuse conform Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead
No pink dawn breaking to be seen ahead The sky full of bruised clouds aching to storm In her dark mind towering thunderheads
Starved, strangled passion bleeding out blood-red No space for dreams outside the prescribed norm Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead
Clinging to sanity by a thin thread Stuck screaming unheard in protective form In her dark mind towering thunderheads
Trapped in a black vortex of clawing dread Demons, nightmares and evil spirits swarm Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead
Shivering cold in a lonely blue bed Dreaming of being held in embrace warm In her dark mind towering thunderheads Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead
Beneath kaleidoscoping lights a couple dances, faces pressed together in a kiss that makes one heart of their two heads, one blissful mouth of their two mouths, as if morphed by mirror to an asymmetric face one half hers, one half his, no space between them.
-Holly York
Responding to KR “The Heat Breaks” and CO30
In autumn chill, leaves flame against the bluest blue, then the moon whispers the sky to violet hues,
“Be still,” she calls out to the wind, but he doesn’t listen, just roars winter in.
I knit a blanket of grey-wooled dreams. I window-gaze, wrapped up in it, till I can open the panes wide
to greenery and pink-tipped spring, and listen to the mockingbird determinedly sing.
-Merril D Smith
Lymphona Prostate – MD30
The solitude of seeing three walls and a ceiling. Enough structure to numb your feeling. Stare at the ventilation for hours on end. Wonder how long this will take to mend.
0.09% of malignancies end up this way. Why me ? Why today ? Minutes last hours, so disconcerting Crash. Bang. Shatter. Here comes catering.
29,Ja,2021 for the thirtieth of. -Alan Gary Smith, inspired by Paul Brookes and the painter MD
is an artist working in glass, metal, fibre and paint. Sometimes her work is based on photographs, but more often, she creates in the moment. She loves to play with texture and colour.
is a Dutch visual artist. He is also one of the two men behind the publishing house Petrichor. Freedom is very important in the visual work of Marcel Herms. In his paintings he can express who he really is in complete freedom. Without the social barriers of everyday life. There is a strong relationship with music. Like music, Herms’ art is about autonomy, freedom, passion, color and rhythm. You can hear the rhythm of the colors, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the raging cry of the pencil, the subtle melody of a collage. The figures in his paintings rotate around you in shock, they are heavily abstracted, making it unclear what they are doing. Sometimes they look like people, monsters, children or animals, or something in between. Sometimes they disappear to be replaced immediately or to take on a different guise. The paintings invite the viewer to join this journey. Free-spirited.
He collaborates with many different authors, poets, visual artists and audio artists from around the world and his work is published by many different publishers.
RedCat’s love for music and dance sings clearly in The Poet’s Symphony (Raw Earth Ink, 2020). Passion for rhythms and rhymes, syllabic feets and metres. All born out of childhood and adolescence spent reading, singing, dancing and acting.
Her writing spans love, life, mythology, environment, depression and surviving trauma.
Originally from the deep woods, this fiery redhead now makes home in Stockholm, Sweden, where you might normally run into her dancing the night away in one of the city’s techno clubs.
is a historian and poet. She lives in southern New Jersey, where she is inspired by her walks along the Delaware River. She’s the author of several books on history, gender, and sexuality. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale and Sparrow, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fevers of the Mind.
-Godefroy Dronsart
is a writer, teacher, and musician currently residing near Paris. His poetry has appeared in Lunar Poetry, PostBLANK, Paris Lit Up, The Belleville Park Pages, and Twin Pies Literary among others. His first chapbook, “The Manual” (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020), explores the space between poetry, prose, and gamebooks. He has a sweet tooth for all things experimental, modernist, and strange. Follow him on Twitter and his Bandcamp for electronic explorations.
-Joy Fleming
Born in County Down, Joy has studied, mothered and worked in Scotland since 1980. Brief excursions to follow her heart, back to NI mid-1990’s and England for first round Covid-lockdown ’19, Joy is currently back living in Glasgow. Joy’s first poem was accepted as part of the C. S. Lewis themed Poetry Jukebox curation A Deeper Country in Belfast in 2019. This poem, Ricochet was published in The Poets’ Republic Issue 8 Autumn 2020. A love of reading poetry is now accompanied by sporadic writing of poetic lines which spill out as an apparent by-product of processing dark and sorrowful days.
-Holly York
lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two large, frightening lapdogs. A PhD in French language and literature, she has retired from teaching French to university students, as well as from fierce competition in martial arts and distance running. She has produced the chapbooks Backwards Through the Rekroy Wen, Scapes, and Postcard Poetry 2020. When she isn’t hard at work writing poems in English, she might be found reading them in French to her long-suffering grandchildren, who don’t yet speak French.
-Alan Gary Smith
A Lincolnshire Ludensian living in Grimsby who built up his poetic stance after visiting Doncaster and Mexborough during his real ale and comedic music searches. Surprised to find a recent DNA check leaned heavily towards being a strong mix of Scottish, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. A sixty year old baldy who loves Julie, astronomy and chocolate; after giving up on football and telly.
-Hilary Otto
is an English poet based in Barcelona. Her work has featured in Popshot, Black Bough Poetry, AIOTB, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and The Blue Nib, among other publications. She received her first Pushcart Prize Nomination and performed at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She tweets at @hilaryotto
-Jim young
is an old poet living in Mumbles on The Gower. He does most of his writing from his beach hut at Rotherslade – still waiting for the blue plaque
Anjum Wasim Dar was born in Srinagar (Indian Occupied )Kashmir, She is a migrant Pakistani.Educated at St Anne’s Presentation Convent Rawalpindi she has a Masters degree in English Literature and History ( Ancient Indo-Pak Elective) CPE Cert.of Proficiency in English from Cambridge UK. , a Diploma in TEFL from AIOU Open Uni. Islamabad Pakistan. She has been writing poems,
articles and stories since 1980.A published poet Anjum was awarded Poet of Merit Bronze Medal in 2000 by ISP International Society of Poets and poetry.com USA .
She has worked as Creative Writer at Channel 7 Adv. Company Islamabad, and as a Teacher Educator for Fauji Foundation Education Network Inservice Teachers
In anguish I am, do not leave my tortured soul behind the unseen bar- a fire within me, is lit, like Mizar and Achenar, from the town of Aduwa I may seem, ashen butt of a cigar near death, pray reveal other side of blue,unbar the shutters so that I may release the smoky coil pray remove the mysttic veil, bare is the tree- I long for leafy green Spring, when love awakens pure souls in wakeful hearts, knowledge enlightens Without the light of love all life is forlorn.
In Response to Christine O’Conner
From the honeycomb bee metamorphosed in size a new wonderland
In Response to Kerfe Roig
Consider man’s plight mistake that removed glory Heaven is a gift
Patches of color hiding evil ugliness broken beauty patched
Kerfie Roig “Star Dancer”
Go in the shadow of the mountain, Sit by the stream and clean all, The mind and soul, wash away to the sea impurity, or else be prepared to face, a tsunami, or the jolts shakes and crashes, Teresias, sat silently, there is still a chance-look! Be the dance, not the dancer,
in the circle of life Come to a still point with nature Where nothing matters anymore-
The Wombwell Rainbow 