Tag Archives: winter

Above Redmires

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

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

Here is a seasonal poem from Speechless at Inch:

Above Redmires

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

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

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

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

Biography

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

Winter Sun Speaks

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

Winter Sun Speaks

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

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

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

Biography:

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

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