Tag Archives: creativity

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Cliff Yates. I met him on an excellent online workshop he ran for the Poetry Business. They published his New & Selected Poems, which brings together poems from five earlier publications – over thirty years of ‘inimitable’ work. Poignancy, economy, humour, a touch of the surreal…

You can find Cliff’s biography and the link to his website below the poems.

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

Day breaks deliberate as a petrol station
newspapers and expensive flowers
but you’re tired of vacuum-packed sandwiches
and sordid headlines.

On the 15.07 out of Deansgate
she’s reading The Holy Sinner.
The dog opposite smiles
through its muzzle.
Coffee, or maybe something’s on fire
we do appear to be speeding
unless we’re stationary and the landscape’s
rattling past. ‘It’s been a good day,’
she says, ‘it makes up for yesterday.’
‘Why, what happened yesterday?’

Days without rain and suddenly it rains.
Another country, your body’s not your own.
You want to go for a walk. In this?

He threw a stick for the dog in Habberley Valley
the tattoo flew from his arms
landed in the bracken like leaves.

Dog

So many places closed: the off-licence,
the butcher, the corner shop, even
the telephone box screwed shut.
Dog had come a long way, and now what?

The cherry blossom, he noted,
looking up for once from the pavement,
was particularly stunning this year,
maybe it was the same every year

but noticing it, his heart was lifted
and he decided not to be disappointed.
The journey had been arduous, the future
was uncertain, but there is more to life,

he reflected, cocking his leg against the letter box,
than a bowl of fruit on a table.

The Lesson

The nun points out the ones to watch:
the boy in the corner, the girl at the back.
In this class it’s the boy in the middle
who thinks he’s a cat.

Outside, workmen are felling trees.
A bird’s nest tumbles in through the window,
lands on a desk. Inside the nest, a baby bird.
It’s okay it’s okay, the children say,
Brian will know what to do.

The boy who thinks he’s a cat
gathers the bird and, holding it
at arm’s length in the cup of his hands,
heads for the door, the nun behind him
between the silent rows of children
and the bird, as if on cue, lifts up its beak and sings.

Lighthouse

The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier.
We watch it in our red pyjamas.
Actually, neither of us are wearing red pyjamas.
You’re wearing my blue shirt.

The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier.
It’s the only thing we can be sure of.
Everything’s uncertain
since you set alight my record collection.

I’m trying to work out an appropriate reaction,
rearranging things in my head to eliminate
all memory of the record collection.
The lighthouse flickers on and off.

Actually it doesn’t, you point out, it just appears to.
You look amazing in my blue shirt.
I haven’t words to describe how good you look
in the light from the lighthouse. Now you’re here

now you’re not. Maybe I should burn
something of yours, you suggest.
Your voice leaves me in the dark.
It doesn’t sound like you when I can’t see you.

Cliff Yates was born in Birmingham and has been publishing poetry since the 1980s. His New & Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2023) brings together work from various collections including Henry’s Clock (Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition), Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Arts Council England Writers Award) and Jam (ACE Grant for the Arts). He taught English at Maharishi School in Skelmersdale and wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School during his time as Poetry Society poet-in-residence, following the success of his students in poetry competitions. He has led courses for, among others, the Arvon Foundation and the British Council.

Cliff’s site: https://cliffyates.wordpress.com/

Books – Unread & Banned

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Last year I wrote about the ‘Ongelezen Boeken Club’ (Unread Books Club), a new venture where libraries promoted books on the ‘null list’ – books that have never been taken out.

This year, the ‘Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag’ (National Day of Unread Books) coincides with another new initiative: De Week van het Verboden Boek (The Week of Forbidden Books). Bookshops and libraries throughout the country are showcasing books that have been or are still censored.

On Wikipedia, you can find an article on book censorship, a list of banned books and the main list of books banned by governments. This starts with the Bible and Albania and ends with Yugoslavia.

If I counted correctly: 66 countries. ‘Almost every country places some restrictions on what may be published, although the emphasis and the degree of control differ from country to country and at different periods.’

Wikipedia lists 66 books that have been or are currently banned in India. A small number, relatively speaking. The earliest is a Gujarati translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. This was banned by the British Authorities in 1909. In August 2025, the Indian Home Department banned 25 books for ‘propagating false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir.’

Here in The Netherlands, there is only one book officially banned: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1924). In 2014, a bookshop owner in Amsterdam was found to stock and sell the book. There was no prosecution.

However, training for new staff in bookshops routinely includes how to deal with aggressive customers. Library staff find returned books with pages torn out. A Dutch survey last year found that (1 in 7) authors had to deal with aggression, threats, intimidation – much of it online.

Here is the cover of Lale Gul’s debut published in 2021, when she was 23. It’s an autobiographical account of growing up in a strict Islamic family. It became a bestseller and was translated, but Lale has since been in hiding.

If Tallinn is on your bucket list, you can visit the Banned Books Museum while you’re there!

The Last Corinthians

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I’m delighted to share three poems by Matthew Paul from his new collection with Crooked Spire Press. The poems demonstrate Matthew’s ‘unflinching clarity’, and his ‘fierce attention to detail’. His biography follows the poems and there you can also find a link to his own website.

Spent Matches

Mum lets only Granddad light up in our house.
The second Thursday of every other month,
she fetches Grandma and him over from Sutton.
The chalkhill-blue elegance of the Wedgwood
ashtray rhymes with unfiltered smoke rings
pixilating like Ceefax in the living-room air.

Teatime doesn’t wait for Dad: Hovis, Primula,
Shippam’s fish paste, allotment tomatoes, cress;
mini rolls, Penguins, cremated fruitcake; pots
of Brooke Bond PG Tips; Beryl Ware replaced
by Royal Worcester, on Hay Wain place mats.
Chit-chat wilts like Dad’s California poppies.

Mum fills space with monologues. My brothers’
progress; mine. WRVS activities. Her botched
hysterectomy. We watch Grandma’s must-see,
Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’
says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters
and Legs & Co. baffle him into silence; except

when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’.
‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s
memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless,
to Chamberlain’s jubilant declaration of peace.
Barely through the door, Dad re-buttons his coat
to take them home. Granddad beams, ‘Abyssinia!’

A Common Hand

I don’t have to prove whether I did it or not; if they can’t see it, what kind of damned experts are they? [. . .] I’m not a crook; I’m just doing what people have always done in the history of the world: ever since art was invented, people have made imitations of it.
Eric Hebborn, ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’, Omnibus, BBC TV, 1991

Eric pestles oak gall, gum Arabic, pinches of iron
Sulphate and rain into ink with ‘a gorgeous patina’,
To pen his line on slyly foxed paper, in the styles
Of Pisanello, Poussin and sundry other old masters,
Reshaping preparatory sketches to make pentimenti,
Faking collectors’ monograms as cherries on top.

At junior school, Eric, aged eight, discovered that
Burnt Swan and Vesta matchsticks’ charcoal tips
Burnished imagination’s marks, incurring, firstly,
Welts from a leathering for possessing matches,
Then a three-year stretch in an Essex reformatory
For wilfully setting cloakrooms on fire. A flair for
Painting sees him into art schools, lastly the RA,
Where, though he wins every prize, contemporaries
Remember Eric only as ‘a silent creature’; ‘a joke’.

They would say that, since he’s brought their craft
Into disrepute. ‘Dealers are not interested in art, but
Money,’ he says. ‘The real criminal, if there is one,
Is he who makes the false description; guiltier by far
Than had he manipulated the nib himself. Ignore
The fusspots. Enjoy art, without worrying whether
Attributions are correct.’ Museums have everything
To lose from uncovering Eric’s handiwork; queasily,
They check their acquisitions back to the Sixties
And issue, de haut en bas, highly selective denials.

‘No one is studying art with honesty,’ claims Eric,
Upon the publication of The Art Forger’s Handbook
In Italian. Out in Trastevere three icy nights later,
He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva,
Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.

In Which I Spend a Fortnight of my West Berlin Summer in 1987 Doing a Few Hours’ Cleaning Per Day in Some Multinational’s HQ

My Iraqi supervisor Zaynab and I enjoy,
for our lingua franca, helpless
amusement. Every day, precisely
at knocking-off time,
we point at the clock, chorus ‘Sechs!’,
then cackle like siblings.

Dieter, fellow cleaner, never gets our jokes.
Just like me, he’s twenty and nearing
the end of a gap year; mandatory,
before enrolment at Humboldt.
Mine’s elective, for my mental health.
He and I view the city’s halves from the roof:
the Wall zigzags like the Western Front.

Afterwards, we take the U-Bahn
—he buys a ticket; I don’t—
to the agency’s office, at Nollendorfplatz.
He translates the clerk: I won’t get paid
until next week. ‘Scheisse,’ I say.
Dieter deadpans: ‘She said,
“Ah, so the English boy
can speak German after all”’

Biography

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in June 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. He blogs here.

Sub/urban Legends

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It’s an enormous pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Pam Thompson. Pam and I met 13 years ago on an extended writing course. You can find her biography below the poems. These are from Pam’s prize-winning pamphlet and show the range of her writing. The Paper Swans pamphlet competition was judged by John McCullough: ‘Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair’. The intriguing cover image is also by Pam.

Explorers, Antarctica, 1901

The leader sits on the sledge.
He never does this.
It’s against the rules of the expedition
but now there are no rules.

Two huskies – the two
remaining huskies, they ate the rest –
sit either side like imperial lions.

The ship is stuck in frozen waves.
The crew are starving or dead
but this photo will be evidence
that they reached their destination.

The photographer in the black hood.
Stepping back. Pulling the cord. The flash.

Self Portrait as Fulang Chang

Freedom, chica, is all. I’ll wear
the mandarin’s hat and silk waistcoat,
eat all the honeyed grapes,
to stay favoured, like a first-born.

I perch on her left shoulder,
always on guard, never at ease.
I bare my teeth and scream,
at Diego and the village dogs.

I am the brush passer, ear
for her secrets, but I am all chat,
you know, teller of her tales
though she isn’t one to keep schtum.

The bloody hearts we paint
will drip onto the Blue House floor.

Fête Galante

Take the bus from outside the Water Margin Chinese restaurant—or from where it used to be in 1974—allow plenty of time. You’re at work in Lewis’s, folding up school shirts badly, cramming them back in their packaging; in a History of Art lecture looking at a slide of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’. The bus will be full, people will be smoking on the top deck, so will you. This must be your stop. Is it everybody’s stop? You join the flow—you think of Tracy Emin’s tent with the names of all the people she ever slept with, or is it her messy bed you’re thinking of. All the beds you ever slept in. Lewis’s. All the shops you ever worked in. And the canteen in the factory where the men always patronised you. Here—you say to the tiny chef—you scrub the bloody burnt pans. All the patronising men you ever worked for—they all get off the bus. You watch them cross London Road. You haven’t moved very far. The Water Margin is the water’s margin and you wonder how this pond, this lake, this sea, arrived in the city. There are willows, and, over there, a fête galante, a woman on a swing, being pushed and pulled, higher and harder, by all the people she ever slept with.

Biography

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in March 2025.

Exit Strategy

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It’s my pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Patrick Wright. Patrick and I met years ago at Manchester Poets. Earlier this month his poem Archive, inspired by Anselm Kiefer, featured on the blog. You’ll find Patrick’s biography at the end of the post.

Today I’m sharing more poems from his substantial collection Exit Strategy, a ‘vivid exploration of grief and loss’. Tamar Yoseloff said of the collection: ‘Patrick Wright is one of those rare poets who can translate the complex images of visual artists into precise and pitch-perfect language.’

Patrick has been inspired by artists past and present (Rousseau, Klee, Rachel Whitehead, J M W Turner), to mention some well-known names.

The collection uses a wide range of forms (couplets, tercets, stanza, sonnet, ghazal, prose poem) and makes excellent use of white space through columns and indents. WordPress can’t do justice to formatting. Therefore, I’ve chosen poems with a more traditional lay-out.

COLD DARK MATTER

After Cornelia Parker

Thanks to you I am learning to see again
through a sparseness of particles—

like how I learned to listen to an eyelid
twitch once yes and twice no through a coma.

Darkness I’ve come to realise is a privilege—
known at 4am & sleepless

the sun rising like a scalpel
& turning the room purple.

Somehow, we go on & somehow it never ends
& we go on like a double pendulum.

Perhaps love is like this fixed explosion.
Perhaps you’re nearer now than the word belief.

SHADOW OF A GIRL PLAYING WITH A HULA HOOP
After Giorgio de Chirico

It used to scare me, what this girl is doing,
or those around her, off in the blind field.
Seemingly a girl playing with a hula hoop,
or just a shadow, no source, just a shadow
next to a wagon, its backdrop here a dusty
plaza. Somewhere, I feel, from an upstairs
room, an eye looks at me. Somewhere, off
screen, a murder is taking place, this shade
a clue. Even so, things are too belated now,
this girl clearly a phantom and not a muse,
like she’s in a toy shop or inside its puzzle,
no girl playing so nonchalant with a hoop.
The sun, at these times, is no longer a sun,
more likely a lamp. My fingers are syllables.
And this pine table where the postcard sits
is full of knots, staring like gods from above.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’S UNTITLED

& already I see alpines
prise their way through the brutalist grey
of Chernobyl floors. Through the sarcophagus
they reach for sunlight. Maybe we only learn
what the burn of graphite means once blind.
I know you better after knowing disaster.

I’ve studied the colour theories
of Goethe and Albers where the wheel
& the wheel of life are a way to feel closer.
I am the stalk through the fallout, one that insists
on pushing its way & one that’s been patient.
On the surface we share the mark of detonation.

They say a town like this is void
though one pulse of a deer’s heart
makes it a plenum. A full spectrum will reveal
itself only when you’ve pledged to cease
hurting. Through this I see what you saw
when the sun set & made shades on a radiator.
We are both on the side of art.

WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH SKATERS AND BIRD TRAP
After Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I find no pleasure in the ice.
Everything about me lies still—save for murmurations.

Peasants weave between trees: each crystalline
like coral on a seabed.

I give you a winter landscape in place of a mirror.
The bird trap is my heart.

Soon it will be still, a skull in a crypt, lit by candles.
My hills are a wishbone. They undulate under great tension.

The skaters are insouciant, crows peck their shadows.
My face startles—a chance alignment of stars.

Skaters are on slippery ground
and if they should slip, they have nothing to cling onto.

Biography

Patrick Wright’s poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The North, Gutter, and The London Magazine. His debut collection, Full Sight of Her, was published in 2020 by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His pamphlet, Nullaby (2017), was also published by Eyewear. His second collection, Exit Strategy (2025), was published by Broken Sleep Books. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Open University.

Dimmet

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It is a pleasure to introduce our February guest poet Rob Miles. I do not know Rob personally: we have been Facebook friends for some time. I bought a copy of his recent collection Dimmet which was published by Broken Sleep Books. See below the poems for Rob’s biography.

The glorious cover image of a murmuration was designed by Aaron Kent. Dimmet is a West Country word for dusk, twilight. Katherine Towers notes of the collection: ‘These are poems of great precision and delicacy’. I’ve chosen four poems which demonstrate these qualities.

Dimmet

His hands still bronzed, still
baling-raw. His voice
no longer snared, whisper-low
as decades ago, in this same field, he guided me

to not disturb that horse; circling
quietly, its half-scattered straw
an ingot melting, and my thin flames no match
for such a sunset anyway.

On this, another near-to-night, it’s clear
that he has no more kept his mind
from wayward sparks than I
have closed my eyes

before any fading fire, ever since recalled
a slow white shadow
steady on its dial
in the always almost dark.

Café Poem

Just when I think there is nothing
so boring

as someone else’s childhood
a toddler

in dungarees is guided
around our table

by his puppeteer parent, arms
up, in a vertical sky-dive, or

like a drunk, when walking
is more about not falling

every step forward
rewarded with a double high five.

I whispered to the dog

that she’d been a winner
a Crufts champion

at least twice. Once
she saw off a Dobermann, burglars, a werewolf

even the odd Sasquatch.
I reminded her

as her old eyes darkened
that she had saved lives.

Making Way

A keeper, you said of the house, but I’d sensed everything
trying to make its way: those errant velvet fingers
from your orchid pots; the oak
putting on its chain mail of ivy and moss
and losing; the birds we fed still pinned
to their shadows; crisp wasps
electrocuted by views
through grubby double glazing, and you
just weeks before, showing your wrists
as if uncuffed, asking for my thoughts on a fragrance.

Biography

Rob Miles is from South Devon, and he lives in Leeds where he is Fellow in Film Studies in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures at The University of Leeds. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, recently in Stand, New Welsh Review, The Scores, Spelt, 14 Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, One Hand Clapping, Poetry Wales, and four Candlestick Press pamphlets. He has won various awards including the Philip Larkin Prize, judged by Don Paterson, the Resurgence International Ecopoetry Prize, judged by Jo Shapcott and Imtiaz Dharker, and the Poets & Players Prize, judged by Sinéad Morrissey.

Lucy Newlyn describes Dimmet as ‘the best collection of contemporary poetry I have read in a long while’, and John Glenday writes: ‘When it’s done as well as this, there’s nowhere on earth poetry can’t go.’

February

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A seasonal poem and sampler by Rebecca Cullen who is our March guest poet. It’s from her collection A Reader’s Guide To Time. I very much enjoyed Rebecca’s take on February and hope you do too.

Friendship

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Friendship is the theme of this year’s Poetry Week, celebrated in The Netherlands and the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium through 400+ events. It starts on Thursday 26 January. Miriam Van Hee (B) and Hester Knibbe (NL), two poets who have been friends for almost 40 years were commissioned to write five poems each for a book. In a recent interview they said that trust and curiosity are key elements for a friendship to endure and last.

Anyone who spends over 12,50 Euro on poetry books during Poetry Week will be given a copy. It’s not hard to spend that sort of money, as poetry books are expensive in The Netherlands!

Here is my poem on the theme of friendship: memories of a long weekend in Vienna in 1994.

Vienna

I would gladly return,
walk with Wendy through
the rain to the museum,
see the Hunters on the Hill –
tired, wet dogs, in the Little Ice Age
when frozen birds fell from the sky.

I would gladly go back there,
view grey buildings slide past,
hear the clanging bell.
Schwedenplatz, umsteigen.
A trolley bus securely attached
to the two lines above.

Speak Easy (Stephen Smythe)

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It’s a pleasure to introduce Stephen Smythe. He has been involved with Speak Easy since it started (at the SIP Club in Stretford) and that’s where we met. The SIP Club closed during the lockdown and Speak Easy then moved online. I was able to take part from my caravan in The Netherlands, along with poets and writers from London and the US and elsewhere.

Stephen Smythe is a Manchester writer who achieved an MA in Creative Writing from Salford University, in 2018. He was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize, Flash Fiction category, in 2017, and was also longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, in 2018. He won The Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, in 2022, and was placed third in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition, in 2021, for his 1000-word story.

His book of forty x forty word stories published by Red Ceilings Press is due out later this year.

Here are two prize winners to give you a taste…

KLEPTO

Bridget took stuff from her work colleagues after they’d gone home. Pens, post-it pads, sweets, even family photos. People suspected her, but couldn’t prove anything. When the company introduced hot desking, Bridget became confused and sometimes stole from herself.

(Winner of the Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, 2022)

COLD CALL

‘Wait!’ Dad yelled down the phone.
He put his specs on. ‘That’s better, I can hear you now.’
He listened intently, frowned deeply, then hung up.
‘A conservatory?’ He snorted. ‘Your mother would kill me– if she were alive.’

(Second place in the Bangor Literary Journal FORTY WORDS Competition, 2019)

Links to 1000-word stories

Love Your Neighbour

The Fourth P (weebly.com)

Al Pacino of the Welsh Valleys (weebly.com)

Granny (weebly.com)

Poetry
Sommelier 2020 – Janus Literary

Acacia Publications

Poems & Writing by Fokkina McDonnell

Tag Archives: creativity

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

Books – Unread & Banned

The Last Corinthians

Sub/urban Legends

Exit Strategy

Archive

Dimmet

February

Friendship

Speak Easy (Stephen Smythe)

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