As I was updating the website recently, I was reminded of the lovely interview that Andy N Poet did that very Friday. He came to the flat in Manchester where I then lived. On the 3rd of March I had launched a pamphlet and my second collection at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The launch was one of the reasons for the interview. Andy has now done several hundred interviews. You can find them all on Spokenlabel.bandcam.com Here is the link to my interview: SpokenLabel
When I listened to the interview this week, it felt spooky at times. Early February 2020 I had received confirmation of my ‘settled status’. I told Andy that I hoped to spend ‘most of the summer’ in my caravan in The Netherlands, that I couldn’t immediately tell him who my ‘desert island’ poets would be. At one point Andy mentioned the ‘virus’.
Here is a poem about that Friday from Kate Noakes who is our guest poet this month. The poem is from her 2024 Chalking the Pavement published by Broken Sleep Books.
The sick spring
Thirteenth March, a Friday with which comes a most lauded play, Stoppard’s last contract: Vienna, and a family succumbs, fortunes and losses in Leopoldstadt.
I am treated to the stalls by a friend of a friend, a nice man I do not know. His cancelled cultural holiday ends with a short email critique of the show.
I give him scenes, chronology, pictures, timings avoiding history’s clichés; how I stepped into busy Leicester Square with foreboding that hurried me away,
and how I scurried home to a semi-death: headache, sore throat, cough and struggle for breath.
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.’
It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet David Bingham. We first met many years ago through the British Haiku Society. David was President of the Society from 2020-2022, and in 2020 he was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Haibun Prize. His poetry appears regularly in a wide variety of magazines. See below for further details.
The haiku have all been previously published: in Presence, Blithe Spirit, or Time Haiku. The tanka first appeared in Blithe Spirit and the BHS Tanka Anthology 2022, while the haibun was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Ken and Noragh Jones Haibun Award, 2017. I hope you enjoy the selection.
Haiku
a lifetime overcoming gravity – still it gets me down
Private Keep Out molehills on both sides of the fence
clear night sky – lights from both the living and the dead
away in the wind … the word-filled air
is there a word for it? the sound swans make when they fly
late spring meadow… within the yellow the blue of summer
storming the old hill fort – bluebells and celandine
inland sea the wash from our boat moves the border
stream through sunlight through stream
closing over trails in algae where the ducks have been
I turn to call the dog … then remember
Euston Station – my skin ripples in the hand drier
an apology… the predictive text writes it for me
Tanka
sun shine and motorway spray – I drive through rainbows to be with you
silently together after all that talk watching swallows hawk for flies over the meadow
on waking I turn my dreams inside out letting the seams show for the rest of the day
doors left wide open revealing an unlit space nothing here to steal but the darkness
Haibun
Sleight of Mind
Some people need to know how he pulls the shining light bulbs from his mouth, levitates above the stage or escapes from a straightjacket.
Me, I like the mystery of it; the explanations are always so mundane. True magic lies in the imagination. Switching off the rational mind. Letting yourself go and trusting the conjuror.
I do it with words. Like how I brought you here. Even if you asked me, I couldn’t tell you how it’s done.
snowdrops … mistaking ‘what is’ for ‘what isn’t’
Biography
David Bingham’s debut poetry collection The Chatter of Crows was published by Offa’s Press in October 2014 and in 2020 he was the winner of the British Haiku Society International Haibun Prize.
His poetry appears regularly in a wide variety of magazines, including Blithe Spirit, TimeHaiku and Presence and in anthologies, including: the Wenlock Poetry Festival anthologies for 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016; Beyond Words, 2018 and where silence becomes song, 2019, the International Haiku Conference Anthology, published by the British Haiku Society; In the Sticks, 2021 and Away with the Birds, published by Offa’s Press; In Snow and Rain, 2022, an anthology of tanka published by the British Haiku Society; and Festival in a Book, published by the Wenlock Poetry Festival, 2023.
At different times, he was editor of both Borderlines and Blithe Spirit magazines and joint editor of the haiku and related genres anthologies Ripening Cherries, published by Offa’s Press, 2019 and Shining Wind published by the British Haiku Society, 2024.
He has read his work in arts centres, pubs, theatres, on local radio and poetry and literature festivals. He has read at City Voices in Wolverhampton, Country Voices in Shropshire and as a member of Green Wood Haiku at the BHS International Haiku Conference in St Albans in June 2019.
As part of the humorous poetry double act, Bingham and Woodall, he has performed at the Wolverhampton Lit Fest and Comedy Festivals in 2017 and 2018, and at the Ironbridge Festival in 2019.
Rachel Davies and Hilary Robinson have been friends for over 20 years. Friends call them the ‘poetry twins’. They are both accomplished poets and you can find their biography below.
An altogether different place, published by Beautiful Dragons Squared, is a joint project. In 2022 Hilary’s husband was diagnosed with vascular dementia; in 2023 Rachel’s partner with dementia and Lewy bodies. In the introduction they write ‘dementia is a catalogue of cruel diseases’. Living with and caring for someone with dementia ‘you come to know grief by slow degrees’. Through poetry Hilary and Rachel ‘found a joint space to laugh, cry, find context and write out their experiences’.
The collection is sold to raise essential research funds for dementia charities in the UK. It is a privilege to share a selection of the poems here: Brainworm and Seven ways oflooking at a husband are by Hilary. Rachel wrote Degrees of Challenge and This is not apoem about dementia which was awarded 2nd place in the Hippocrates Prize 2024.
Brainworm
There are many crap poems online for those who care for loved ones with dementia. Dementia has a symbolic flower – the unimaginative forget-me-not. I’ll have none of that shit. I want the gristle of it, the offal, brain-spatter, white matter of it. Show me the MRI with extensive vascular changes, let me count the dead parts of the brain so I can explain, daily, what ails my love. I watch Dirty Great Machines, find Big Bertha in Seattle, tunnelling machine on steroids moving at thirty five feet a day. Something has wormed its way into the tiny vessels inside his head over years and now whole sections of his once-sharp brain have died. It’s our Golden Wedding Anniversary this year. I don’t know who I’ll be celebrating with.
Seven ways of looking at a husband
1 Straight on. Taking in his 2-day grey beard, his nostril hair and ear fuzz. His smile.
2 Side profile. Noticing his cute nose, the same shape as our daughter’s.
3 From the bedroom door. Noting the cocoon he’s made of the duvet.
4 Across the kitchen. See, he’s forgotten how to toast his fruit tea cake, make coffee.
5 From the driver’s seat. Clocking his wince as you pull out safely onto the busy main road.
6 Across the care home corridor. Seeing his smile grow, then his arm around you, his whiskery kiss.
7 On the care home terrace. Look, he can’t turn his head to where you point. Misses the squirrel.
(L) Hilary with David (R) Rachel with Bill
Degrees of Challenge
I’m watching you struggle to break the seal on an ice cream wrapper and I think of the time you redesigned the roof of Piccadilly Station, worked in millimetres to ensure each pane of glass
fitted exactly into the space you’d drawn for it. I remember the night you clipped on a safety harness, climbed onto the roof to inspect each perfect joint, came home buzzing but satisfied at day break.
Tomorrow you’ll shuffle out to the Age UK minibus, the driver watching you don’t slip on the wet steps; but tonight you’re making a major task
of breaking into a Mini Magnum. I know better than to offer help; eventually you’ll pass it to me, say I’m sorry, I can’t seem to
This is not a poem about dementia
I am opening the windows and doors letting in fresh air to blow dementia down the lane like giant tumble weed
I am clearing out drawers and wardrobes filling black bags with hallucinations donating them all to the Age UK shop
I am having the Lewy bodies serviced unblocking its pipes flushing confusion down the drain with the incontinent waste
I am partying like there’s no dementia raising a cake with bicarb of dementia licking up the fluffy dementia crumbs
I am sleeping peacefully in the quiet night dreaming a poem that has absolutely nothing to do with dementia
Biographies
Rachel Davies is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and a retired primary school headteacher. Her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies and has been a prize-winner in several poetry competitions, most recently, the Hippocrates Prize 2024. A selection of her work was published in Some Mothers Do… (Dragon Spawn Press 2018). Her debut pamphlet, Every Day I Promise Myself, was published by 4Word Press in December 2020. Since retiring she has achieved an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in contemporary poetry, both from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Hilary Robinson has lived in Saddleworth for most of her life. She met her husband, David, at secondary school. She gained a BA (Distinction) and a PGCE and became a primary school teacher. After a successful career, Hilary retired and started a Creative Writing (Poetry) MA at Manchester Metropolitan University and gained a distinction. Her poetry is published in print and online journals, and in several anthologies. Her poetry has also been set to music by RNCM students of composition. In 2018 some of her problems were published by Dragons Spawn as Some Mothers Do… and this was followed in June 2021 by her first solo pamphlet, Revelation, published by 4Word Press.
It is a privilege and a great pleasure to share three poems by Kathy Pimlott from her third pamphlet with The Emma Press, published this month. It is ‘an honest, lyrical and nuanced journey through the complexity of bereavement’. The poem What I do with you now you’re dead was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2023. Further down you’ll find Kathy’s biography and links to her website.
Death Admin I
Your demise constitutes a third off council tax; the removal of a vote you seldom cast and then only to be contrary; write-off of a modest overdraft; the bill for an overpaid pension. Tell Us Once promises it will be a doddle. It is not. I repeat time and again in spoken and in written words to the indifferent or distracted, He has died. What do I need to do?
What I do with you now you’re dead
The Queen is dead too and on her way to a proper tomb. Everything’s shut and there’s nothing on tv, but the sun comes out so I go to the mimosa tree where, months ago, I dumped, in a laughing panic, dumped, about a quarter of your ashes and ran away, the illicit thrill exactly what you would have wanted. Today, with a flask, shortbread,
I’ve come because, while I don’t love the Queen, it seems like a fitting thing to do. This royal park is empty, quiet, allowing me to cry all through its splendid long borders with their harmonious purple and blue planting until, on a near-enough bench, I sit. By my feet, Lamb’s Ears offer silky comfort, as does the pile of pistachio shells,
little coracles, showing someone sat here eating a bagful. You kept your shells in the pockets of your gardening coat which I emptied out before taking it to the charity shop with your best shoes. The mimosa’s not out of course but its ferny leaves show promise of the glory to come. A robin perches closer than he should, inspects me,
then accepts a crumb or two. Your ashes have disappeared, no longer so alarmingly burnt-bone visible, so very there. They say the old Queen’s coffin is oak, lined with lead. Three-quarters of you is still in the back of the wardrobe. A crow chases off my robin. So much peril. It’s enough to be sitting thumbing Lamb’s Ears, thinking about you.
The Passing Visit
A friend came by from Brussels and we talked of our dead or rather about what they leave behind, the stuff in storage,
the binding strands. I told him more than I’d told most, of how (and I said, then rejected, the word tumultuous),
how textured our long, long marriage had been and by textured I meant bumpy, dropped stitches, amateur darning. I told him
how often you fell in and out of love and how I left and returned more than once. Perhaps because I didn’t care enough, I said.
And perhaps I didn’t. There was something he wasn’t telling me but the sun was out and we walked the courtyards and backways
of the neighbourhood, crossed the bridge, watching the sky whiten and the coloured lamps in the trees come on. We spoke of cities,
their pleasures. The comfort I find in the river. How Brussels’ Senne is covered over, subterranean. Of moving along and clearing out.
Biography
Kathy Pimlott has two previous pamphlets with The Emma Press: Goose Fair Night (2016) and Elastic Glue (2019). Her debut full collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press (2022). Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she has been longlisted, placed and has won several poetry prizes.
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.
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.
This post is a tribute to my brother Theo who died early on Tuesday morning in hospital. On the evening of Friday 28 June, he went out with his wife Ancilla to celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary. After a lovely meal he had a fall in which he sustained serious brain damage. I spent time with him on the Saturday. Ancilla and my nephew were with him when he died.
It was only last autumn, when a MRI scan was taken for other purposes, that my brother learned that he had the rare condition of multiple cavernomas. This explains the paralysis and subsequent sudden hearing loss. The poem 1962 was published in my debut collection Another life.
My brother had a rich and full life. The photo was taken in 2019 when he and Ancilla both received honours (Member of the Order of Oranje-Nassau) in recognition of decades of charity and community service.
1962
Alexander Eduard (coppersmith in the bible and van Beinum, the famous conductor). Our Irish setter had been given the names of an unborn child.
A ward of six, our parent’s daily drive, almost an hour each way. Neurologist, paralysis, lumbar puncture, nausea.
Grandfather owned an electrical shop (double-fronted on the main street), gave my brother a beige-brown radio.
The specialist allowed our red Irish setter to visit my brother, celebrating his fourteenth birthday in the academic hospital in Leiden.
Three months later he arrived home, just in time for Sint Nikolaas. My brother still limped and his crown was marked by two scars at right angles, the space between dipped and dented. A few days later grandfather came to take his radio back.
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.
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.
Acacia Publications 