In the last month I've had a collection accepted for publication by Oversteps Books! www.overstepsbooks.com It will be called The Point of Waking and will come out later this year. Working with an editor to design a book is quite a learning curve!
I've also had a poem chosen by Penguin for their upcoming anthology The Poetry of Sex, due out in January, AND my first piece (prose) to be published in the next MsLexia! Am I on a roll? I hope so!
Friday, July 26, 2013
Bare Hands: Departure Lounge
Bare Hands had a competition for poems and photos on the subject of Bare Hands!
This poem was Highly Commended and is on their website, which is full of intriguing poems and artwork - have a look! http://barehandscompetition2013.tumblr.com/
This poem was Highly Commended and is on their website, which is full of intriguing poems and artwork - have a look! http://barehandscompetition2013.tumblr.com/
Departure Lounge
I’d tucked the last of our green figs
in a thermal mug in your hand luggage
with these fingers now linked
to your working hands
that fix things: locks on gates
the windsurf sail, the cistern.
They played on my skin this morning
teasing out tension
between my shoulder blades.
And your eyes that look
at all of me
and your tongue…
that time when I wept
with self-loathing
it licked the salt from the wound.
The queue for the check-in is long.
You tell me to go but I stay.
It’s hard to find conversation.
When you reach the corner of the stairs
I text, ‘I missed you first.’
A Knowledge of Meadows
This poem was written after a walk near Dronfield in Derbyshire. It has gone through various versions but I am very happy that it has now been published in Artemispoetry Issue 10, selected by the wonderful Anne Cluysenaar. Artemispoetry is a bi-annual magazine of women's poetry, articles and reviews published by Second Light in London - I love it!
A Knowledge of Meadows
Site of Special Scientific Interest,
a sign had said, evoking fences,
closure, inspections. Not this
damp muddle where air is heavy
with the breath of meadowsweet,
unruly above betony, darts of orchid,
sparks of ragged robin,
hoary willow herb, bloody spears
of sorrel, rock roses: a holy hash
of Flora’s things, half hidden
by high hazel already speckled
with pea green clusters
the milk teeth of nuts.
That’s a native small-leaved maple
and an airy space of aspens whispers
over a hollow at the bottom of the field.
I feel a marsh of past meadows
in me; shift through mist to bogs
of marigolds and lady’s smock,
and rushes we’d peel all the way
to school, not knowing that before
schools began, their wicks
lit the lamps of history.
Now, framed in a gap in hawthorn,
lake bright, pale as bulbs:
a group of ponies, all the colours
of summer clouds. Their backs are bare
horizons, their bellies, globes.
Muzzles lift curiously, manes
raise question marks as they swerve
towards me, and noses nuzzle me,
hot with scientific interest.
The Living Line
The next meeting of The Living Line women's poetry group is on Sat August 10th. Come and enjoy writing and reading poetry on a summer's day in Grindleford! We have room for a couple more women writers - level of experience not important. Get in touch!
Friday, May 24, 2013
Saturday, November 10, 2012
The New Writer
In 2011, my submission was highly commended in The New Writer's Collection Competition. This Autumn they published the following 3 poems from that submission. They are all poems set in Crete, and I love the way they set them out all on one page - thank-you The New Writer, I feel honoured!
www.thenewwriter.com
Borders
It was easy to find
the herb garden. A boy, dark-skinned,
puts down his hoe to show us round
beds of rose bergamot, cinnamon trees,
five varieties of sage, a bank of blue hyssop.
He picks us leaves that taste of chocolate,
sprigs of things to sniff - savouries, thymes and mints -
pointing out subtle differences
like someone born to it.
‘Did you grow up here?’
No, he’s from a place in Northern Pakistan,
famous for cricket. He’s walked here,
he says. Had to. Eldest son.
No, not Afghanistan, he almost laughed,
too dangerous. Through Iran.
Arrived in Thessalonika. No work.
Athens. No work. Terrible, he says.
A friend brought him here.
‘So you’re safe here?’
I see him hoeing, watering, harvesting
the healing herbs. ‘It's paradise in Crete?’
He shrugs, looks at the soil on his feet.
‘I live over there,’ waving vaguely
at mauve mountains.
‘I cannot live in village. Police.
No papers. Papers only by marry.’
I pinch out a smile.
Tagetes are piled on the drying nets,
bloody as sunsets, behind him.
The thyme is on fire, seething
with bees.
Easter Monday
Morning air still
has the chill of spring
in its veins
but we wake bleary
from too much blood of God
in ours
still heavy
with Easter’s
spit-roast sacrifices.
We drink the blood of two oranges,
breathe basil
and singed cypress wood.
Spun light pulses
wireless
between geranium and lavender.
Paired doves
make love with same three notes
an interval apart.
The single yellow iris
cuts its quivering chiaroscuro
out of carob shade
waiting
for the baritone drone
of the bee
to sense an entrance,
lever the velvet sepal,
bumble in,
and leave,
perfunctory
in its purpose.
Peaches
September. School is back.
I'm on the beach, biting the flesh
of a soft, sun-ripened peach.
A cicada tuts from a tamarisk tree.
I think of my grandma, who once,
on a Greenline bus in Hertfordshire,
after the war, when I was four,
announced her disapproval of peaches.
'All skin and stone.
Nowt between worth the money.'
Hanna, sumptious as a peach,
sprawls sultana golden on a beachbed
borrowed from an old man
toothless and walnut skinned,
who watches her all day
from under his tamarisk tree.
Hannah doesn’t mind. Whatever
turns him on. She has a bed:
he, food for fantasy.
Both have their peaches, free.
Autumn 2012
Published in The Interpreter's House 51, October 2012
I love The Interpreter's House because it's a treasure trove of mostly shortish poems, mostly just one per author, and also because they always seem to choose the poem from my submissions that I thought least likely to be accepted!
To keep it safe
I could slab up blocks of clay
to sculpt the memory of this bay.
I’d leave roughcast edges
jagged against screens of scenery blue.
Lower down, I’d whittle away
a curl of lip, sphincter, vulva,
blow-hole and cave-mouth
for molten glass
precious as marbles, to fill.
Winkle out slithery things:
a scuttle of crabs, a starfish,
a twitching slippage of squid.
Further out in indigo blue,
shoals, oh shoals and shoals
of nib-sized fish would be writing
epic novels of the deep dimension,
illuminating pages with ghosts
of living oceans past.
Rhyme and Reason Writers have published a beautiful desk diary of poetry and prose on the subject of Seasons, in aid of Ian Rennie Grove House Hospice www.irgh.org.uk. They have been raising funds in this way for 22 years, which is phenomenal! It's a lovely book to dip into through the year, and would make a lovely present at the modest price of £5! Poet Gerard Benson judged the poems, and this one of mine was chosen.
Four Seasons: Notes
Winter evenings sweat wet woodsmoke
and a bitter tar drips from the zomba’s chimney.
Ravens crunch the air like split kindling.
By midnight, sharp moonlight
carries salt on its tongue, stings
with new snow from the mountains.
I hear Death and the Maiden.
Spring sweeps in with a hiss
of swifts, unzips its hoard of golds:
sunspurge, crown daisies, Jerusalem sage,
in a Hallelujah chorus. And I’m listening
for jasmine, but what I get is orange blossom:
notes flagrant as the cadences of a kora
or that aria from Tosca.
Summer is brittle, splits pods, spits pellets
to a raucous chorus of cicadas.
A sexy armpit stink slithers
through open car windows, from the sticky
weed that stays green when the rest is straw.
Mastic oozes. Scents are deep as carob honey,
dark as Desert Blues.
Autumn’s first drops on hot earth release
pheromones of hope, stir sea onions
to send out spires of light. But too early
and they spoil the grapes with mildew,
sour the wine. Half-dried sultanas rot.
Fermenting figs drop on the road, stick
in the ribs of our soles. Thunder,
distant drum rolls.
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