Category Archives: News

My family and other birds

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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.

To Live Here

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This month’s guest slot is for poems from To Live Here, an anthology of haiku published by The Wee Sparrow Press. The Press was founded by Claire Thom. 100% of the proceeds of their anthologies are given to charity.

The anthology is edited by Giorgia Di Pancrazio & Katherine E Winnick. The lovely cover and illustrations are by Scottish artist Colin Thom.

To Live Here is “A collection of haiku on the theme of home, which explores the many facets of human experience, from the mundane to the sublime. Featuring the work of talented poets from around the world, this anthology invites readers to reflect on the beauty and complexity of the world we inhabit.”

Salford Loaves and Fishes, a charity supporting the homeless, has already received over £600. The anthology is available through Amazon – ISBN 9788409528165. I’m grateful to Francis Attard and Julie Mellor for permission to share their haiku.

sandy beach
turtles lay clutches of eggs
off-shore breeze

Francis Attard, Malta

three cornered field
the generations
who farmed here

Julie Mellor

on the verge a stork stepping out

Fokkina McDonnell

Forgetting My Father

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Photo credit: Naomi Woddis

It’s a great pleasure to introduce our December guest poet Jill Abram. Jill and I met several years ago on a writing workshop. I have chosen four poems of Jill’s pamphlet Forgetting My Father. The beautiful cover was designed by Aaron Kent and was inspired by rhododendrons in the last of the poems. You’ll find Jill’s biography and links after her poems.

This is the last post of 2023: Season’s Greetings to you; thank you for your support.

How To Belong

At Jewish youth club we all wore
Rock Against Racism badges
and danced to Glad To Be Gay –
girls in one ring, boys in another.

They ate ham sandwiches when
their parents weren’t looking yet
scorned me for Smokey Bacon crisps
and going to school on Yom Kippur.

The Evangelicals lured us into their
church hall with ping pong then tried
to keep us with singing and prayers
and Jesus. They wanted all of us.

Words Are Not All We Have

Words are all we have. – Samuel Beckett

Don’t get into debt with anyone but me!
Dad’s sole instruction when he left me
at university. When we did the reckoning
he took the hit on my car’s depreciation.
And because I’d sold it, he drove 300 miles
in his to bring me and all I owned home.

We argued over SI units once. I fetched all
my A-level text books, showed him proof
after proof. He wasn’t having it. He’d grown up
with imperial; I knew metric, and that I was right.
Next day he brought a page he’d found at work,
looked at the floor as he handed it to me: I withdraw.

Now he can’t say anything because of the tube
in his throat and maybe – we’ll know when they
remove it – that blood clot. When I try to leave
his bedside, he grips my finger and won’t let go.

My Sister Is


a gold coin:
She is precious.
Her style is simple and elegant.
I’d like to exchange her
for something of equal value.

an alarm clock:
Controlled by radio from Rugby,
accurate to a fraction of a second.
If she were by my bed, she’d go wrong
and wake me at 5am.

a mid-morning beverage:
Green tea fits her philosophy,
black coffee her personality.

a steamroller:
She’d say that was more appropriate
for me, being heavier than her.
I’d say she has a greater power to crush.

a bear:
Will she be a ferocious, mama grizzly
or cuddly teddy? We never know
until she gets here.

a window:
Round, square or arched?
Hmm, certainly arch

a hand thrown pot:
Finest china drawn out thin, glazed
in lustrous copper and cobalt. In the kiln,
a bubble formed on her rim.

a coffin:
Made to measure, lined with silk,
a velvet cushion, and no shortage
of people to carry it.

Slow Orphaning

Images slide across my lock screen at random:
hot pink rhododendrons at Kew last May,
glasses of rum and ginger on a hotel balcony.
Here’s Mum, pensive and beautiful as she
gazes at the skyline from a Thames boat
when she came to see me. The last time
I tried to visit her, she said she was busy.

Dad teeing up on the ninth at Dunham
in an orange cagoule. Rain never held him back.
A heart attack slowed him. A bypass stopped him
at a stroke. His body survived fifteen years
while his mind died and I grieved for
so long. So long I was surprised
there were still tears for his funeral.

Biography
Poet, producer and presenter, Jill Abram is autistic, has Jewish heritage and lives with fibromyalgia. She grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. She has performed her poems, which have been widely published, across London and beyond, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, StAnza, Paris, USA and online. She was Director of the influential collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen for twelve years. Jill’s debut pamphlet, Forgetting My Father, was published by Broken Sleep Books in May 2023. Jill has a newsletter. You can sign up via her website or directly via this link and here is the link to Broken Sleep Books, if you want to buy a copy of the pamphlet.

Fieldfare, blown off course, early spring

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A lively and intriguing title for a poem sequence by our guest poet Lydia Harris. Her work has featured here before (March 2019). This sequence is from her new collection Objects for Private Devotion, beautifully produced by Pindrop Press, published last year. Lydia lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Many of the poem sequences in her new book focus on local culture, people, nature, objects – such as the prayer nut which provides the cover image.

The sequence about the fieldfare is inspired by the great Serbian poet Vasco Popa. The Blackbird’s Field is also a sequence, from Popa’s Collected Poems, close on 400 pages – drawing on folk tale, surrealist fable, personal anecdote, and tribal myth.

Fieldfare, blown off course, early spring

After Vasco Popa

My Fieldfare

He’s made of bone pins.
He’s a book inside a box
with a beak-shaped lid.
A snapped-shut lock.

He Makes Landfall

at Hagock where the Scollays
ploughed in patches,
wore tracks with their boots,
gulped spring water,
built their house.

Body

His muscles hurtle
from rump to neb.

First Song

The sky is my eye,
earth my egg.
From Noup to the Ness
in the turn of my head.

How I know him

His underwing flashes,
he wheels before settling
on plough or pasture.

His Manners

When the tide is asleep
he swallows it.
His wings are granite
with a hundred eyes.

Second Song

Bone grinds skin,
stone splits grain.

His Passion

Flames again.
He thinks he is clay.
The sea wrought him
like a mace head,
speckled, banded,
half-way done.
Bird before he was bird.

Third Song

Snapped flint,
water-worn
sea pebble.

His Dress Code

He squints through an eye mask,
lifts his mottled back through west winds,
across north winds.

A Flagstone in the Wall Speaks to Him

Grapple with my grain.
My night surfaces.
Tap the lichen from my face.
Draw silver from my base.

Lament

I’ve lost my folk,
my night ships,
my dear blood,
thick then thin,
night bird, stray bird.

Tongue

A whip of liver-coloured flesh
sheathed in the coffin of his beak.

His Heart

Its flicker forms ice,
his own padlocked air.
His map of the wind
stiff with frost
in the skirts of an old storm.

He Takes His Leave

Fooled by the moon.
He’s lost his bearings,
like the night boat.
We need to talk
on the edge of sight.

Biography: Lydia Harris lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Her first pamphlet Glad not to be the corpse was published by Smiths Knoll in 2012. In 2017 she held a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award. Her pamphlet A Small Space was placed first in the Paper Swans competition 2020.

Austere beauty

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I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Louise Glück. She is, perhaps, best known for her poetry collection The Wild Iris, which was published in 1992 and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem opens the book: At the end of my suffering / there was a door.

Her 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, also from Carcanet, gave me both comfort and confidence as I was struggling to complete the manuscript of Remembering / Disease. ‘You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently.’ Each time I entered this world, I felt closer to home.

Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her ‘unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.

The title poem Faithful and Virtuous Night is a long poem, over 10 pages, consisting of short stanzas. It ends:

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or, perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.

Hard Drive

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It is a great privilege to share Paul Stephenson’s poems here. His debut collection was published by Carcanet in June this year. See the end of this post for Paul’s biography and details of his three poetry pamphlets.


When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. In Hard Drive a prologue and epilogue hold six parts of almost equal length. These poems take the reader through the journey of grief: Signature, Officialdom, Clearing Shelves, Covered Reservoir, Intentions, Attachment.


‘A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints’, Paul also has a talent for intriguing titles: Other people who died at 38; Better Verbs for Scattering; We weren’t married. He was my civil partner.


There is a great variety of form: erasure poems, use of indents and columns, haibun, prose poems, alongside the narrative poems which range in length from three lines to the five-page poem Your Brain. Unfortunately, WordPress can’t do justice to the poems which need formatting.


I have chosen four poems from four parts: What Jean saw, Battleships, On mailing a lock of his hair to America, belatedly, and Putting It Out There. Battleships is a particular favourite – precise and poignant.

What Jean Saw


Through the letterbox
the little bald patch of you
asleep on the floor

Battleships

I must sort his room, a room as full
of ships as any room could be, clear up
the battle waging on open seas.

I imagine them, christened one summer afternoon,
careering down their slipway
ironclad onto polished parquet.

Red and blue ships strewn – mile-long,
laden with guided missiles,
locked onto my feet, closing in on my knees.

Picking up a ship, I cup it, poor target,
slide a knife in the cracks
between floorboards to extricate others.

No mayday for these navies in trouble,
these heavily manned fleets,
their broadsides struck, hulls torn and listing.

For the scuttled and sunk, damaged
and wrecked, the ships reported missing,
I bag them up and think charity.

No more games here.
No more torpedoes in crossfire – hit!
His room a tidy horizon, the radar blank.

On mailing a lock of his hair to America, belatedly

Would his hair be worth it?
Would his hair provide comfort?
Would his hair cause upset?
Would his hair be an act of violence?
Would his hair destroy their day?

Would his hair survive the journey?
Would his hair have to declare itself?
Would his hair be seized?
Would his hair still shine?
Would his hair be hair after all this time?

Putting It Out There

So here I am worrying myself to death
about commodifying your death,
arranging and sequencing your death,
curating the left and right pages of your death,
deciding which parts of your death to leave out.

Here I am again, giving a title to your death,
choosing an attractive cover for your death,
(will your death have French flaps?)
writing intelligent-sounding blurb for your death,
thinking how we might best promote your death,
who might best be willing to endorse it.

Still me, waiting to be sent a proof of your death.
I’ll need an eye for detail to check your death for typos.
I’ve got to get it right – the finger-feel,
the texture of the paper of the pages of your death,
ensure a sharp jet black for your death’s ink.
(I’m wondering about the numbers in your death’s ISBN).

Before I sign off on your death – your death done,
and wait for a box with hard copies of your death
and organize things to launch your death – finally,
then wait, for reviews of your death (hopefully considered),
to be told how well your death has sold.

Biography

Paul Stephenson studied modern languages and linguistics, then European studies. He has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He is a University teacher and researcher living between Cambridge and Brussels.

website: paulstep.com / Twitter: @stephenson_pj / Instagram: paulstep456

paper crown

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This is my 300th blog post. Many thanks to all the blog’s followers, also for your likes and lovely comments. They are much appreciated. I’m taking a break from weekly blogging: I need to ‘fill the well’ – take myself out to find poems and art on the streets of The Hague, get inspired and fired up again. I’m celebrating the 300th post in the company of Cecile Bol – our August guest poet.


Cecile is also the organiser of the Poetry Society’s Groningen Stanza. When I moved back to The Netherlands , I was fortunate that their meetings were on Zoom due to the lockdown. It was great to meet Cecile and other members of the Stanza in person earlier this year. The hotel where I stayed is just a few houses down from the literary café De Graanrepubliek where they meet.


I have chosen three poems from Cecile’s chapbook Fold me a Fishtail. Read more about Cecile and the book below her poems.

yet you speak of resilience

there are things that make me sink back into the grave
(red on black, stardust freckles, knee socks, foxy wrists)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I saw a flowered brown tie turn into a snake
woke up crying, your shoulder blade stuck to my lip
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

same table, same cheap wine, same talk, another day
you pull me close as if you’re not pushing me in,
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

like the cute demon I asked how I should behave
– he said ‘always choose slyly between loud and still’ –
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

they nibble at my feet, ask if this time I’ll stay
(petrol candy, flawed magic, and plenty to kiss)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I seep through layers of earth, call out all their names
yet you speak of resilience as if we can win
there are things that make me sink back into the grave
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

paper crown

a cut-out crown is still a crown
for a girl on a stolen horse
I would have swapped our sanities
to see her hair become lost in
rose horizons, saddlebags filled
with boxes of chocolate sprinkles

I’d been chasing robber children
long before we met – and I will
stick with this selfish travelling
until or well beyond my death
but she – she bore whole galaxies
sprinkled into maps on her skin

in my inside pocket you’ll find
scissors, tape and golden paper
the day I borrowed her reindeer
I thought in time she’d ride my horse
instead I stop at roadside shrines
and eat chocolate sprinkles daily

robber child: arguably the most interesting character in H.C. Andersen’s story The Snow Queen is the unnamed little robber girl

Krasokouloura

I should have made them milk
and bread, while they were still in bed –
instead, I impulsively fired up
the electric oven – as always, procrastinating –
to bake twenty ring-shaped Greek cookies
with things lying around the cupboard.

Flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon,
salt, ground cloves, some olive oil
and another glass of white wine.

I should have written them a note,
but I’m that cat; as always, capitulating
to curiosity – I had to taste one, still warm,
curled up on the windowsill – new sun,
please, tell me what skills it would take
to achieve immaculate roundness.

Biography:
Cecile Bol is a Dutch writer with a small family and a big edible garden in the north of the Netherlands. She doesn’t have an MA in Creative Writing, because things like that don’t exist in her country. She does, however, earn her money as a self-employed copywriter. The somewhat well-known poet Helen Ivory describes Cecile’s work as ‘like finding snakes in your strawberry patch’. Cecile enjoys incorporating fairy tales and popular culture in her poetry, and her poems often have a slight erotic edge. Cooking (mostly Greek) food is her means of meditation. Cecile owns 57 different kinds of herbs and spices of which cumin and dill are her favourites.


Cecile’s debut chapbook Fold me a Fishtail was published by UK-based Selcouth Station Press in 2022 (Sadly, Selcouth Station Press ceased to be in 2023). So what’s Fold me a Fishtail about? Cecile: “I sometimes wonder whether Disney’s Ariel misses her mermaid tail, now that she’s the legged wife of prince Eric. Isn’t she way too curious and free-spirited for a conventional family life? Or is that just me? That feeling chained to a husband, toddler and suburban lifestyle was enough to drive me dangerously crazy? Fold me a Fishtail is a collection of mostly confessional poetry about a long journey into, through and out of (?) the dark.”

Favourite objects

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Credit: geralt via Pixabay

A prose poem of mine was published in # 185 of orbis magazine. The inspiration may, in part, have come from reading the long prose poem 12 O’Clock News by Elizabeth Bishop.

It refers to eight items in her room, with a gooseneck lamp standing in for the moon. The first section ends ‘Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.’

I love the humour in it. Here is the description of a pile of mss: ‘A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties.’

Bishop’s prose poem changes tone as it continues. With the final object, ashtray, we’re suddenly in a warzone; there are dead bodies, corrupt leaders are mentioned. It’s even more devastating because of the ordinariness of the object.

Animate and inanimate objects relating to J Abraham

The favourite mug

Waisted, Nile green, curved handle, fit for purpose: dishwasher proof; delicate gold lettering The Frog Prince, on both sides: black frog, gold crown. I admit to one shadow side: pangs of jealousy when on Sundays I see him take out the old cup-and-saucer. Mr Abraham is a bachelor, but tells visitors he has been married twice, to the same woman. In fact, he is an inspector of taxes.

The handkerchief

With a yellowing initial I do not get many outings. It was a proud moment last Friday, row H in the stalls, aisle seat. A Bruckner motet. That gentleman called ‘J’ keeps concert programmes in a special box file. Used to sing in a choir, but has given up on Him upstairs.

The ashtray

My life as a masochist, the short version. I am clean and I have barely any burn marks. To make matters worse, I was moved to the shed. Technically, it’s a Summer House, but no windows, so no tax is payable. He should be told that non-smokers too can die of lung cancer. I am praying for a relapse.

The moustache

Hegel, Kant, Wittgenstein, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire. Cogito, ergo sum. Sum, ergo cogito. A butterfly can remember its life as a chrysalis, and I have full cognisance at cellular level of my previous manifestations. JA grows me specially, once a year, for a charitable purpose. This year I have a Teutonic shape. The flecks of grey soften my appearance. Mug, handkerchief, ashtray – they will end up in a grey bin, or at The Red Cross. I will have the last laugh.

The newspaper cutting

Protected by a plastic wallet, I’m a piece from The Guardian 08.05.12. How we made … Break Down: Artist Michael Landy on how he and his collaborator destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions. Need I say more?

as if thrown by a boy

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Here is the second selection of poems by Judy Kendall, our June guest poet. She lived and worked in Japan for almost seven years. Cinnamon Press published four collections of her haiku and ‘mainstream’ poems. You can find her biography below her writing.

Poems:


The First Fountain Ever Placed In A Japanese Garden
for my mother

more than half
is the sound of it
as it splashes on the stone rim

this is the part
the thousands of photographs
will never reach

their takers stop
to make a frieze
and then move on

no chance of hearing
the other half
clapping its moving shadow in the trees

the shudder
when the leaves
follow the foam

which drops, unmoved
as if thrown by a boy
to fall through air

diluting
dissolving
into parts


Note:
The first fountain in a Japanese garden was built in Kenroku en, Kanazawa, in 1861


Driving To Noto

Men are better says Toshi I know
no they are not says I (I also know)
and so we argue to the tip of Noto

To Suzu where the wood huts slump in shock
plopped suddenly in frocks of snow
and the sea is whipped to icicles of frenzy

Over a nabe pot of fish and cabbage
(Toshi warns me not to call it cabbage
for it is the vastly superior hakusai)
our host asks me my age

Taken aback
(I`m older than he thought
more single), he inquires
don’t you like men?

So I assure him
only frequent country-moving
has prevented me from choosing
one of them

The returning road is white, wide as a field
the ditches spread themselves with frosting
and the windscreen blanks out like a blizzard

Toshi scrapes at the iced-up wipers singing
to himself, waving me in

Midwinter hangs in the boughs

The pine trees are bent nearly in two
laden with second helpings

(earlier version published in Ambit)

Short poem, haiku and tanka from The Drier The Brighter (Cinnamon Press, 2007):

Poem:

5 am

these cold skies
cheating the dawn,

these bits of tree,
blocks of houses too close to houses,
shrouded people, shrinking in the weather.

Haiku:

too much autumn
the reds are almost scorching now
a mouth brimming with leaves

tanka:

leaving.

not one stick of furniture
in the room.
in the heart,

no tears.

(previously published in Presence)

Biography:

Judy Kendall worked as an English lecturer at Kanazawa University in Japan for nearly seven years. When she first went to Japan she was a practicing playwright but she soon began to focus on poetry and haiku, kickstarted by an invitation to to participate in a collaborative translation of Miyaiki Eiko’s haiku. This became the bilingual publication Suiko /The Water Jar. Since then she has been writing haiku and haibun along with other poetic and prose forms. The haiku mode has informed her four Cinnamon Press poetry collections, particularly Joy Change – composed while she was in Japan. She has won several poetry awards, recently receiving a 2019 Genjuan International Haibun An Cottage prize, and is the essays and bilingual translations editor for Presence haiku journal. She has also run the Yorkshire/Lancashire haiku group.

She is Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University, and aside from haiku and haibun, works as a poet, poetry translator and visual text exponent. She has published several articles and books on the translation and creative process, including ‘Jo Ha Kyu and Fu Bi Xing; Reading|Viewing Haiku’ in Juxtapositions, 1 (2). She is currently putting the finishing touches to a monograph for Edinburgh University Press on Where Language Thickens (focusing on the threshold between articulation and inarticulation in language – a threshold in which haiku itself is surely situated).

St. Agatha’s

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The day after my birthday I travelled back home and saw St. Agatha’s church from the train. That brought back memories of the poem – a competition winner some years ago.

This too is art

Mondays, washing days.
Heaving sheets from one tub
through the mangle into
another tub on a wooden stand.
Hands placing them, spacing
them on a plastic line.
This is street art
where the westerly wind
coming in from the beach
takes the plumes from the iron
works’ chimneys,
lets them pass through
this small town – a station,
hospital, three churches.
Tiny spots mounted on white sheets,
black dots like bugs, the yellow
eggs of unknown insects.
This is smoke art, chimney stack art
landing on roofs, window sills
and the steps of St Agatha.