The sun rises every day, but each dawn is unique, a doorway to a new room waiting to be furnished, or a tilled field ready for planting.

When I became a mother for the first time, it was all new to me—the birth, bringing our daughter home on a cold February day to our recently purchased house, and then learning to take care of an infant. Breastfeeding was easy; trying to figure out how to unfold the heavy baby carriage and get it and her out the door and down the steps was not. But—the second time I became a mother, it was new again. There were similarities–it was another cold February day, but the labor was different, and I was different. Caring for a toddler and a baby at the same time was also a new experience. Like each day, each birth is both similar and singular, as is…

This blog article aims to record my appreciation of the many wonderful ‘people in poetry’ I have met and worked with over the past year. I would like to thank each and every one of them for their extraordinary efforts in a year when we have all had to overcome immense challenges simply to handle everyday life. To achieve anything additional to getting through each day has required greater determination, patience and flexibility … and more creativity and ingenuity in finding new ways of doing things. So thank you to everyone in the world of poetry who has helped anyone to find ‘an outlet for their output’ during a year that seemed determined to lock everyone in and close everything down. Thanks for your resilience and energy … in spite of everything.

Publications and Launch Events

Firstly, huge thanks to the hard-working and astonishingly innovative publisher, Mark Davidson of Hedgehog…

One breath—a cloud-blush
and almost away, a fiery, fever-dazzle
wakens, though you remember the ghost embrace,
you are given morning, one, then two–
each a secret unfolding–not always, but if,
a window opens to sea scent and wind-kiss,
linger in its whispered blue,
wait for the caramel light–and after
the soft laugh of stars.

The Oracle seems to be offering messages of hope at the start of the year. As usual, she knows everything. I looked out at a gray morning, but as I started walking the sun came through the clouds.

Introduction by Lord ‘Broc’ Howk

Over the years, the Greater Bradgate Range of Leicestershire has yielded strange journeys. The territory is laden with ghosts, mostly in the form of venerable oaks with their crowns chopped out – reminders of poor Lady Jane Grey, that very young and innocent queen, who after her nine days of royalty was beheaded. And there is also Old John himself, that old beer mug of a folly atop one of the grander peaks. In the wrong light one can hear the whinnies of the tortured horses that galloped around the race circuit that encircled Old John’s prominent lookout. They weren’t really tortured, but by gods we can imagine the racket. And none of this, of course, is believable – rather it requires a particular kind of faith, a particular way of looking at things aslant. And the same too can be said for the miniature…

From the series ‘Towards a Theory of Social Housing’, Karl Hurst

Early on a bitterly cold, January morning, I walked through Derby city centre, on my way to work. On St Peter’s Street, in the recessed doorway of Lloyds Bank, a homeless couple were bedded down together in a nest made out of dirty blankets and two zipped together sleeping bags. They were obviously huddling for warmth. A few days later, making that same journey, the scene had changed. The recessed doorway had been hosed and soaped down. You could still see the suds, draining into the gutter. On lampposts opposite were two offerings of flowers, in cellophane. I don’t know if these details were in any way connected, but it’s hard not to think so. It reminded me of a spate of articles I’d read over Christmas: articles presenting data gleaned from interviews with homeless people. This data…

The Sheffield and Tinsley Canal, September 2012 (photograph by Nikki Clayton)

Conventionally, we use the term ‘vernacular’ to describe dialect ‘spoken by ordinary people in a particular country or region’ (Oxford English Dictionary); or ‘language spoken in one’s mother tongue, not learned or imposed as a second language’ (O.E.D.). This second definition is instructive: it reminds us that a great deal of what we call correct or Standard English, and its sister, Received Pronunciation, was a system imposed on some speakers after they had left the first world of home and embarked on formal schooling. Many books on dialect ask us to discriminate between merely slipshod or slovenly English and genuine dialect, but I think it’s fair to say that formal schooling has had a part to play in the fade-out of vernacular language in this country, especially in mainstream poetry [i]. A linguist might chastise me for…