Category Archives: Art

Breakfast

Leave a reply

Here in The Netherlands Kookboekenweek (Cookery Books Week) has just ended. A recent annual event, it’s designed to promote cookery books. Bookshops and libraries organise workshops, lectures, and tasting events. Of course, it’s all to encourage people to buy books as presents for December: St Nicolaas and Kerstmis.


Professionals shortlisted six books (Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (2), and baking skills). They’ve chosen Bloem Suiker Boter, by Nicola Lamb, translated into Dutch. I’m going with Breakfast, a poem celebrating poetry and friendship.

Breakfast

Bridie would be in the kitchen,
barking with Finn and Tara
in a metal cage under the table.
I’m in your backroom, sheepskin
on the seat of the wooden chair,
just gone 9 o’clock this Tuesday.

You’ve made the scrambled eggs
exactly as I like them, with enough
mustard and fresh chives.
Now you’re coming in with yours,
followed by your small dogs
who settle on the settee, by the fire.

We catch up over this monthly meal.
Soon we’ll sit silently behind our laptops,
typing up poems from old notebooks.
Now eating toast with ginger preserve,
I look out of the window; the smiling
Buddha is lit up by the sun.

Slow Movement

2 Replies

It is an immense pleasure to present this month’s guest poet Sarah Mnatzaganian. Poems from her award-winning pamphlet Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter were featured here before. Today’s poems were chosen from the dozen that were included in Slow Movement, an exquisite small journal designed, created and stitched by poet Maria Isakova Bennett. The photo of the cover doesn’t quite do it justice.

The sequence was one of four winners in the 2022/2023 Coast to Coast to Coast poetry prize. Maria wrote ‘Slow Movement is a sensuous sequence of love poems expressed through the colours, sounds, materials, and obsessions of cello making and sailing.’ The sequence is dedicated to Robin, the cello maker; poems were previously published (Poetry Wales, Magma, Poetry Salzburg).

Bogle

Two wedges of maple are ready for the vice.
The cello maker scans the silken surfaces for flaws
but the wood looks clean as buttermilk.

He leans and pushes translucent ribbons,
tissue paper thin, through the plane’s grey mouth.
Stops. A failed twig-hole, a dark finger of incipient rot

points from the joint accusingly. He groans,
grabs a back-arch template, offers it to the knot.
Smiles. He’ll outwit the bogle this time.

He heats hide-glue in the pot and rubs the joint
until it gels and bites, the halves aligned and left to dry.
Next week, he’ll flip the plate like a stranded tortoise

and hunt the blemish with his keenest gouge
until he holds a hollow brindled shell,
bogle-ridden wood chips snapping at his feet.

Laying up

Salt-bitten snap shackles slump down the forestay
and surrender to the pull of his thumbs.
He drags an impossibility of canvas over the guard rail
while I hug the rest free of the wire.

The sail crumples like a giant wedding dress,
crocodile-toothed with zigzag thread. It’s time
to climb down to the queasy buoyancy of the old
polystyrene pontoon, to stand fifteen feet from him

and guess where in this pale tangle of cloth to grip
with my left hand; how far to reach with my right.
We’ll tighten the white distances between us
and fold each crease over into a taut edge

until we make a concertina of the sail. He’ll nod
and fold his end towards me, two foot at a time.
I’ll do the same for him until our halves meet
and lie without stretch or slack,

my luff to his leech, head to his foot,
clew to his tack, throat to his peak.

Bridge

He’s in the kitchen, leaning over the hob,
dropping a bridge blank into the frying pan.

I start to speak but know he can’t reply.
He’s counting down the seconds till it’s time to flip

the steaming bridge, to press and count again.
Twenty, twenty, ten, ten, five, five. Done.

He stands the bridge to cool. Takes the next.
I’ll kiss him then, to pass annealing time.

Twenty to please my tongue and lips. Twenty
more to tighten breasts and scalp. Ten, ten

to spice my skin. His free fingers stroke a slow
five, five around my willing ear.

The unread book

Leave a reply

Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books.

Upstairs, around 200.000 books are on loan. If a book is not taken out during a period of two to three years, it moves onto the ‘null list’ and disappears downstairs. Here a good 400.000 books are stored along 24 km of shelving. At the exhibition, there is an old-fashioned telephone on which visitors can ring and reserve one of the unread books on the ‘nul lijst’.

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

This is the cover of a historical novel, Gewassen Vlees, by Thomas Rosenboom. It won the dutch Libris prize (worth 50,000 Euros) in 1995. It’s over 700 pages long. I am never going to read it. A friend gave it to me. He died in 2000 and that’s the reason it’s still taking up shelf space.

Flying a kite

1 Reply

My friend Kathleen Kummer recently had her 95th birthday. We have had a weekly telephone call since the start of the first lockdown in March 2020. Kathleen’s poems from her collection Living below sea level have featured here before.


Flying a kite refers to the ‘90s, as the grandson is now in his thirties. He lives abroad, but regularly visits. A variation on the villanelle form, the poem successfully blends the personal and the universal.

Flying a kite

My grandson and I are flying his kite.
Though we stand on the earth’s green rim in spring,
there’ll be talk of wars on the news tonight.

We have climbed the steep meadow, have not taken fright
at the notice, Beware of the Bull. Larks sing
as my grandson and I are flying his kite.

We have coaxed it upwards, where wind and light
give life to what was a limp, gaudy thing.
Time enough for reports of the fighting tonight.

Its streamers rippling, the wind just right,
it rides the skies, a jocular king.
My grandson and I are flying his kite.

These skies are empty, but for the flight
of buzzards and invisible larks on the wing.
The skies they will show on the news tonight

will be apocalyptic, eerily bright
with the clever ways of destroying and killing
to which the whole world claims the right.
I am watching my grandson wind in his kite.

Boxes

Leave a reply

It’s good to get an acceptance and even better when it’s prompt! Thanks to Paul Brookes for accepting this poem and two others for his online poetry journal The Starbeck Orion. You’ll find it here: the 880.substack.com. Issue 4 is themed. Current contributions are open themed.


You will be asked what your favourite constellation is. I bought the domain name acaciapublications in the early 90s, so you won’t be surprised that Camelopardalis is mine. It is a large but faint constellation of the northern sky representing a giraffe.


The poem was written from a prompt on the Boxes workshop with Graham Mort. WordPress wanted to make it a list, which messed up the numbers the lines had. We like a non-sequitur…

Boxes

I declined it. The man in black nodded, walked back to the horse.

Boy, am I glad I can feel my legs.

There must always be doors for the pleasure of opening them. Cats know this.

Boardroom brown, expensive pens, hand-rolled cigars, promises on parchment.

On display in the glass case: the motorbike, black-and-white photos, three bullets.

Groundswell – so little land, so much water.

Was I not meant to see the deep scarlet lining?

Cromer, June

2 Replies
Cromer Pier and Esplanade

As the church bells began ringing, we were off – like thoroughbreds out of the starting boxes. We’d arrived on Saturday, inspected the spacious and comfortable rental property. Then enjoyed a delicious fish dinner at No. 1 Cromer Upstairs.

My morning flight from Schiphol landed at Norwich. The views of the coast and the Broads reminded me of other times. The poem was first published in The Pocket Poetry Book of LOVE (Paper Swans Press, 2018).

With love to my five talented poet friends…

Cromer, August

Curved around Cromer Pier a twitching mass of legs,
sturdy calves, socks, sandals. Fathers scoop up bait,
wind black thread onto pink plastic spools.
An old couple, in matching anoraks,
watch a thin man, wheelchair-bound.
He shakily lifts his thermos flask.

I thought of you then and the creaking stair lift,
the plastic roll-up seat, raising her in and out of the bath.
The small wooden cart you made
so she can travel through the orchard
inspecting the new fruit with her crooked hands.

Past Tense Future Imperfect

1 Reply

It’s a pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Jon Miller. We met some years ago on a poetry workshop. His biography is at the end of the post.

Jon was winner of The Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Award 2022 and his latest pamphlet Past Tense Future Imperfect (2023) is published by Smith|Doorstop from which these three poems are taken.

They Made A Crime Series Here

We are miles off Hringvegur, American satnav garbling
‘Fjardarheidi’: a high pass, a blizzard shreds the windscreen,

then down to Seydisfjordur, where the road stubs itself out
against the fjord; like us, it has given up fighting the inevitable.

Past the fish factory, its yellow flag cracking the wind.
Corrugated sheds, oil tanks. Houses stare into themselves.

This town has let out all its breath, waits to take another
next century. For the lonely, binoculars stand on windowsills.

A thought bubble: Stay low. The world is not your lobster.
Tie everything down. Run for port. A beard hides a lot of guilt.

Picnic benches crouch like crabs at car parks and supermarkets;
husbands keep engines running in case wives make a break for it.

A camper van – rented – drifts by, turns down the wrong road,
bikes shrouded in grey, a child’s face at the window.

Beside the filling station three farmers lean into a trailer,
debate the efficacy of bladed implements. One looks up.

Nothing connects until everything does. We have tickets,
drive into the ferry, its belly, its deep machine hum, extras no longer.

Lost Child

Not the brazen trumpeters
or the flittering sailboats
or in the minds of mariners
with their white-washed eyes
is there a button of hope.

Neither in the small boys roaming
the fogged avenues
called home for tea
returning with birds’ nests
and the ruins of puberty.

You become a twitch
in the fingertips of newscasters
or out here where it happened
the midnight click of the latch
the song in the five-barred gate.

This Way to the Observation Lounge

Out through the placid archipelagos they go
at ease in their daylit aquarium
moving over water at the pace of a slow car.

The sea is flat on its back. The flag barely mutters
at the mast. All are hypnotised by empty sea and sky,
by the line where nothing meets.

They have left the world to turn without them.
and sit with hands clasped in laps
as if listening to a sermon on vacancy.

Asleep, they twitch to escape their clothes.
They know themselves the way the blind
feel what they cannot see.

I could tuck in chins, settle a head on its neck,
retrieve dropped novels, while their eyes read dreams
the way an unborn child pushes against its mother’s belly.

They are at rest. Someone is on the bridge.
Over the horizon is harbour. Weather is busy somewhere else.
Who they are has fallen away like rain over islands.

Biography

Jon Miller lives near Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands and has had poetry published in a wide range of literary magazines as well as being a contributor of book and exhibition reviews and literary journalism. He formerly editor of Northwords Now, a magazine featuring writing from the north of Scotland. He was short-listed for the Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2021 and awarded joint First Place in the Neil Gunn Poetry Competition 2022.

A Coalition of Cheetahs

Leave a reply

It’s a great pleasure to introduce our April guest poet Doreen Gurrey. We met on a writing workshop some years ago and belong to a group that meets regularly online. You can find Doreen’s biography at the end of the post. I have chosen three poems from her new pamphlet A Coalition of Cheetahs, just out with smith/doorstop. It was a winner of the 2023 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Prize.

Zoo

From the lit hall, I slide back the hardboard panel
to find you under the stairs, crouched like an Indian street seller
in front of the toy animals you’ve fumbled into a ring.

Hands and knees on chipped linoleum, I crawl in,
smell the turps and boot polish, the must of apples
separated until next year.

You’re listening to the slow clicks of the electric meter,
your heart monitor, sharing the sound with the broom
which shoulders the corner like your guardian angel.

I haul you out, pick up the polar bear, giraffe,
the big elephant and the little elephant, then soothe
the smouldering print, reddening on your thigh.

Yarn

I was learning to knit when you left me,
decoding the language; stocking stitch, moss,
knit2tog., twist; the wool a filigree

snaking through my fingers across
the floor. The note was cold: In Italy –
don’t write or ring. Needles knit up my loss,

a pink anaconda down to my knees.
I learned to pick up stitches I’d dropped,
then all my friends said pink suited me,

asked would I carry on or had I stopped?
I said I’d started another in green,
that casting off was easier than casting on.

Guest

You came with all you needed,
your car a metal suitcase,

the boot full of booze
the back seat housing a portable grill.

Temporary you said, but I forgot
how little you need to live.

You kept mostly to the garage,
the beer stacked next to the tool box,

the radio tuned in to the French news;
you smoked your roll ups and grilled

your côtes de porc.
My washing took on a Gallic smell.

Now you’re gone, I’ve got the garage back,
but sometimes mistake

the growl of the tumble drier
for your phlegmy cough,

the washing machine’s whine
for your whistling.

Biography

Doreen Gurrey trained as an English and drama teacher and for several years ran her own Youth Theatre Company. She went on to become an Adult Literacy Tutor writing and delivering Family Learning courses for the local council. Latterly she has worked as a Creative Writing tutor at York University. Her work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The North and The Yorkshire Anthology. She has won prizes in The McClellan, Bridport and Troubadour poetry competitions. Doreen lives in York and has five grown up children.

Wendsday

Leave a reply

It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Matthew Stewart, with three poems from his collection Whatever you do, just don’t. It was published by HappenStance Press to their usual high standards in 2023. The background of the jacket is an old map of Extremadura, Spain. The poem Gostrey Meadow was published in Stand. See below the poems for Matthew’s biography. I admire the attention to detail, precision, and economy of his poems: so much between the lines…

Banana

Come to think of it, she didn’t tell us
who’d got hold of the banana, or how,
and we forgot to ask, stunned by the news
that at ten years old she’d never seen one.

She was still proud her class had raffled it
for the war effort, still slightly mournful
at it turning black on her teacher’s desk
long before they drew the winning ticket.

She wouldn’t talk about gas masks, the Blitz,
the doodlebugs (how they changed to V2s) —
but she always recalled her fury
at the waste of bloody good food.

Wendsday

Halfway through the word and the week,
my pen used to pause and stumble,
tripped up by my eight-year-old tongue

and even now I still delight
in having learned at last to swap
the n and d and add the e.

I stumbled, too, after coming
to Spain. Shook off routines and rules.
Let a new language soak through me.

Two more hassle-packed, tensed-up days
till vino tinto y queso
instead of cod and chips.

Gostrey Meadow

Showing my son round, I notice
a father taking a picture
of his wife and son who’s melted
half an ice cream on his fingers
and the other half on his face.

It’s a copy of a photo
in our album. Same river.
Same heat-laden sky. Same roles.
Same spot on the bank. Same pose.
Our trees were ten feet shorter.

Biography

Matthew Stewart lives between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in the South of England. He works in the Spanish wine trade as a blender and exporter. His blog site ‘Rogue Strands’ is a respected source for poetry lovers, and he reviews widely for a range of publications. His first full collection was The Knives of Villalejo (Eyewear, 2017). Before that, there were two pamphlets from HappenStance:
Tasting Notes (2012) and Inventing Truth (2011).

My family and other birds

Leave a reply

It’s a great pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet: Rod Whitworth. We first met, probably, a good decade or so ago. His poems have been widely published and successful in competitions. One of these, the poignant Demobbed was featured here on 30 May, 2021. Rod recently launched his first full collection My family and other birds. I’ve chosen a selection of poems on the themes of family and birds and, of course, jazz.

Tandem in Holland

On that day, your smile
hung like a sunrise
over the polders.

And on that day, your voice
greeted me like blackbirds
singing to claim and to yield.

And on that day, your touch
thrilled like a breeze
from the pine trees.

And that day brought the knowledge
of itself and knew
that it was this day.

Portrait of my grandfather, accompanied

The daft smile, wide as a spiv, tells us
Sunday afternoon, after a slow left-arm morning
and Chester’s Best in the Cotton Tree.
You’re sitting in the sun on the donkey-stoned
front step of Number 51
in undone waistcoat, collarless shirt, felt slippers,
a Capstan Full Strength drooped from a trailing hand.
This is happiness: transported
from your brother Llewelyn who never left the Somme,
from crying all the way home after delivering jam and marmalade
to shops in Coventry the day after it was blitzed.

On your right knee: me, plump
as a queen’s cushion, wide-eyed,
in Auntie-Louie-knitted rompers,
not knowing any of this.

Names you know, names

It was Rod, the other one,
the one who listened to American radio
on his Communist dad’s short wave,
who, one bright April morning
between the 53 bus stop and school, said
You’ve got to listen to this bloke,
a pianist, Thelonious Monk.
He’s something else. Another world.
I told him no-one could be called
Thelonious Monk. It took me
two years to find out he was right,
on both counts. What he didn’t know though
was that Monk’s middle name was Sphere.
By the time I knew that,
the car Rod was travelling in
had crashed into the lamp post.

One for…

He was walking away
when I noticed the wings.

Furled they were, but still
visible against the dark blue

hoodie. I don’t believe in angels
but it does make you think.

I called him back, asked him to intercede.
You’re asking a lot from a magpie

he croaked, then flew off.
Made me feel sorrowful.

I wished he’d had a friend.

Biography

Rod Whitworth was born in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1943, and has done a number of jobs, including teaching maths (for 33 years) and working in traffic censuses (the job that kept him on the streets). He currently works as a medical rôle-player. Rod has been writing poetry for a few years and has had work published in a number of journals and anthologies. His first collection, My family and other birds, was published by Vole Books in 2024. He now lives in Oldham and is still tyrannised by commas.