Monthly Archives: December 2022

Enxaneta

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Credit: Makamuki0 via Pixabay

My thanks to poet Annie Muir for this seasonal poem from her pamphlet New Year’s Eve. Best wishes for your own New Year’s Eve – wherever you are. See you in 2023.

Enxaneta

In Barcelona it is 38 degrees
and a little girl screams with mimicked joy –

she is all eyelashes, all eyes,
all teeth and gums and tongue.

I hate her through the eyes of her big sister:
half a plastic broken heart tied around my neck,

I climb a fence to watch the castellers.
They huddle, arms up as if reaching for a throat,

others climb them like stairs, feet clinging to backs
like tadpoles on their first legs,

it doesn’t stop, more like ants than people
but with muscle and bone and white trousers,

two little girls heading for top,
one takes her place below, the other

is no longer a child but the star
at the top of a Christmas tree,

her arm pointing up is the man on the moon,
a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve.

She slides down the legs of her supporters,
relieving the mountains of tension from their shoulders.

Biography

Annie Muir lives in Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet New Year’s Eve was published by Broken Sleep Books. Pre-pandemic she handed out poems on the street outside local libraries, and has a podcast – Time for one Poem – aimed at complete beginners to poetry.
@time41poem

Food Match

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Credit: Life-Of-Pix, Pixabay

A Christmas Day poem with my best wishes for the day and with my thanks to Matthew Stewart. In his pamphlet Tasting Notes (Happenstance Press) he pairs poems with notes about the Zaleo wines from Extremadura, a region with several UNESCO heritage sites.

Food Match

It glistens on the wooden stand,
a black trotter pointed upwards
as if offering a hoofprint.
Now cut a slice so thin that steel
is visible below the meat.

Place it across your tongue and wait
for the marbled fat to melt. Sip
un vino tinto. The tannin
grips, hugging the ham — both of them
start, suddenly, to magnify.

Credit: GerardBarcelona, on Pixabay

Biography:

Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade and lives between Extremadura and West Sussex. His second full collection is due from HappenStance Press in November 2023.

There are a few copies left of Tasting Notes. Contact Matthew direct via social media.

Above Redmires

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The poems of James (Jim) Caruth have featured on the blog before. Here is the link. Last year his new collection, Speechless at Inch, was published by smith/doorstop. It was shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2023.

The striking cover image is of Janet Mullarney’s The Straight and Narrow. Made in 1991 of painted wood, it measures 228 x 320 x 137 cm. It’s in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Here is a seasonal poem from Speechless at Inch:

Above Redmires

It was mid-December, a back road
through the low hills that nurse
the city’s northern edge, when I came upon

a flock of black-faced ewes
crowded in a corner of a field,
a squeeze of tattered wool and clouded breath.

I stopped the car to look around,
searching for a dog slipped the leash
or a fox tasting the air along the hedgerows

but as far as I could see
there was no other living thing
between those frightened sheep and me.

Biography

James Caruth was born in Belfast but has lived in Sheffield for over thirty years. He has had several pamphlets and a collection published: A Stone’s Throw (Staple Press, 2007), Marking the Lambs (Smith/Doorstop, 2012), The Death of Narrative (Smith/Doorstop, 2014) and Narrow Water (Poetry Salzburg, 2017).

Winter Sun Speaks

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I am delighted to feature the poem Winter Sun Speaks by Maggie Reed. We first met on a residential workshop several years ago. The picture of winter sun is also by Maggie.

Winter Sun Speaks

I birth my cry through cloud layers
push my weight low over the southern horizon,
strident, desperate, slanting over the hills
forking through trees, splintering ice.
I blind drivers on the school run.

How I ache for summer skies, to leap and arch
over the earth, spread light, energy and love.

But for now my shriek, my low level beam, insists
my right for the few hours I’m allowed
to crisp up these dark winter days.

Biography:

Maggie Reed lives in the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, having spent much of her life in Cumbria. Her current collection Let Small Wings Fly was self-published in 2021 to accompany the Arts Council funded travelling art exhibition ‘Mappa Marches’ that visited libraries and art centres across Herefordshire throughout 2022.

She has been published in several journals, including The North, Orbis, Poetry Birmingham, Pennine Platform, Three Drops from a Cauldron and Poetry Village, and has been included in anthologies such as This Place I Know (Handstand Press, 2018), Places of Poetry (One World, 2019), When All This is Over (Calder Valley Poetry, 2020), Poetry of Worcestershire (Offas Press, 2019) and In the Sticks (Offas Press, 2021). She won the Poem and a Pint competition (judge, Carrie Etter) in 2019.

Crab Snowglobe

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Credit: Kurious via PIxabay

Each Sunday in December there will be seasonal poems on the blog. For a few years I lived in the Withington area of Manchester, so I recognised the shop mentioned in Annie Muir’s poem. It’s from her pamphlet New Year’s Eve, published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.

Crab Snowglobe

Thrown in with shoelaces and paracetamol,
a souvenir from Copson Street pound shop –

this rusty orange crab on a rock
with specks of glitter resting

in every nook and cranny.
Around the base there are footprints in sand

and another, smaller crab,
exactly alike except I can touch it.

Inside your hard, glass globe
you seem to be in some other dimension

like the reflection in a mirror,
or memory.

Either dormant or ecstatic –
when I shake you up

it is for a moment New Year’s Eve,
your pincers grasping to catch the confetti

that floats around your head
in kaleidoscope slow motion.

Then, when each piece has fallen, you wait
for something else to happen.

Biography


Annie Muir lives in Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet New Year’s Eve was published by Broken Sleep Books. Pre-pandemic she handed out poems on the street outside local libraries, and she has a podcast – Time for one Poem – aimed at complete beginners to poetry.
@time41poem