Judge Rhiannon Hooson has chosen Elizabeth Wilson Davies’s poem ‘Heartland’ as the winner of this year’s poetry competition. My poem, ‘After Iconoclasm: The Jesse Tree Window’ and 19 other poems will be published in the Festival Anthology by Parthian Books.
Continue reading Finalist in PENfro Book Festival Poetry Competition
My consideration of Gwyneth Lewis’s collection of poetry, ‘Treiglo’ for the Cardiff Review. A first-rate book in content and also in design,achieving a striking coherence in all respects. Continue reading My review of ‘Treiglo’ for Cardiff Review
It was an inspiring theme from Matthew C. Smith, editor – the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing to be dealt with in no more than 10 lines in an imagistic style. I wrote Moon, Landing from the perspective of the moon coming to earth rather than humans going to the moon. See Broadside 5. Black Bough Poems
On the same theme I also wrote a poem in Ulster Scots which will be in #9 of The Bangor Literary Journal, launching August 18th and First Death of The Troubles, occurred 14th July 1969 about the context of the Moon Mission in Northern Ireland – this is on my website.
I’m delighted to have a poem in Issue 9 of The Bangor Literary Journal, launching as part of the Open House Festival 1pm Sunday 18th August, Bangor. Especially pleased that the poem, Re-entry, Ulster is in Ulster Scots, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing.
The amazing cake made for the launch of The Ogham Stone, 2019. My poem ‘Two Autumns’ is included in this year’s edition.
On June 9th, at the Belfast Book Festival, I had the great pleasure of reading at the Northern Irish launch of The North issue 61, devoted to contemporary Irish poets. It was edited by Nessa O’Mahony and Jane Clarke. I read my poem A Northern Irish Wife to a Northern Irish Catholic Priest. Continue reading Reading at the Belfast Book Festival
The Irish Literary Society hosted the London launch of issue 61 of The North magazine on February 25th. Published by The Poetry Business it is devoted to contemporary Irish poetry:
“119 poems by 106 fantastic poets”.
The Irish Literary Society is a child of the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century. Among its founders were WB Yeats and Douglas Hyde. Since 1892 it has championed and promoted Irish literature and facilitated discussion of and engagement with it. Continue reading The North at The Irish Literary Society
The two poems chosen are from my set prompted by the concept SAINT which also inspired my short story in issue 10 of The Lonely Crowd, ‘Above It All’.
SHOOT
Winter came early for that girl
When the unreturning brother –
The endlessly prevented youth –
Was thrown first in a ditch
And then a grave.
She was the Winter’s girl,
Wearing its icy dress,
So when she saw one parent
Smash the other’s face into a wall
She wasn’t fazed. She understood how well
The rounded skull fits to the palm;
How deep the need to make pain visible since he
Had been hooded when they tortured him.
But she − to Mammy and Daddy both −
She had become
As faint as frost on glass.
Then even the mirrors emptied.
A neighbour, meaning to be kind,
Had asked her to help him set December bulbs,
Late possibilities. She’d cupped a Winter White,
A cranium, papery-skinned and primed,
But when his back was turned
She’d plunged the bulb in upside down,
Cursing it to torment itself
In growing towards the dark.
Since she was a murderer too
She sentenced herself to drink till she was sick
On school-nights out beyond the playing fields.
Thirteen,
And only the cold would do.
But a long dormancy
Can keep something alive.
Forty years on, even the Winter tired
Of cold. It dis-adopted her,
Heading for Spring
When she shouldered her dying mother
And felt how well that heavy head
Fitted the hollow below her collar-bone,
In that embrace sensing
A possibility, though late.
Image: Claire Loader
I’m honoured to have a poem in #61 of ‘The North’, the special issue on contemporary Irish poetry.
It launches on 24th January at Poetry Ireland, Dublin and on February 25th as an event organised by the Irish Literary Society.
http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/shop/993/north-61
