Here is the first instalment of the Spring 2022 issue of The High Window.  The following new material can be accessed via the top menu:

1. A selection of homegrown and international Poetry from 37 poets.

2. Poetry by Lanny Ledboer, the Featured American Poet.

3.  An Essay by Hannah Parkes Smith on some of W.H. Auden’s early poetry.

4. An introductory feature from Rowena Sommerville, who will be The High Window‘s Resident Artist for 2022.

The second instalment will be published in another two weeks.

Enjoy!

David

As we leave 2021 behind us, a year which many of us will be happy to forget, I am pleased to announce that the new resident artist for the next four issues will be Rowena Sommerville.  I also take the opportunity to express my thanks to Stella Wulf who assumed this role last year. Many readers expressed their admiration for her contributions  and, for me, it was a joy to work with someone so talented, personable and thoroughly professional. I wish her well in whatever new projects she is working on.

Like Stella, Rowena is not only  a talented artist but a fine poet.  I am proud that, as an editor, I was amongst the first to spot her literary gifts and to have published a set of her poems. I am grateful too for the many excellent reviews she has written for the journal. [Editor]

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Rowena Sommerville Introduces…

We (myself and Steve Nash) are currently reading submissions for issue five of Spelt Magazine, the magazine I founded just over a year ago. Spelt is a print magazine in which we seek to celebrate and validate the rural experience through poetry, creative non fiction, author interviews, columnists and writing prompts. We’ve made it through a whole year, which is a huge milestone, and we are excited about our second year, which will involve further growth, more platforms and, hopefully, some extra funding. Starting and running a magazine, especially a print magazine, is definitely a labour of love. But It is also incredibly rewarding. It’s a thrilling feeling to be part of the writing and publication journeys of other writers, and to provide a platform for people, and to create something that is so very aesthetically pleasing, it is a great source of joy for me, and something that…

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Love requires an Object,
But this varies so much,
Almost, I imagine,
Anything will do.
When I was a child, I
Loved a pumping-engine
Thought it every bit
As beautiful as you.

W. H. Auden, ‘Heavy Date’.

W.H. Auden is one of those poets who, against perhaps your better judgment, stick with you.

The first Auden I knew of was a peaceable old stick whose poetry compelled grown men to weep at Four Weddings and a Funeral. He was wry, a little savage, a little dark, a little battered, and quite at home on the A-Level syllabus he’d found himself on –the Auden most of us take comfort in, when we find the world too much with us.

The second Auden I dug up was little like him. The second Auden was an adventurer, like the Eardstapas before him, travelling the winding roads of the Old English landscape…

Today I welcome fellow Swansea University alumnus, Ellie Rees, to reflect upon a poem from her fabulous new collection Ticking (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2022).

The poems contained in Ticking were written in response to separate stimuli; what linked them in my imagination as I wrote was my desire to capture the spirit of a place, an attempt at a deep mapping through the medium of verse.

The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classed as Nature Writing, though the term, deep mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides and ruins as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of…