*
This issue of London Grip New Poetry features poems by:
*Rodney Wood *F.M.Brown *Rik Wilkinson *Sissy Buckles *Robert Etty *Antony Johae
*Ruth Bidgood *Elizabeth Smither *Elizabeth Barrett *Sonam Chhoki
*Deborah Tyler-Bennett *Shadwell Smith *Jonathan Taylor *Bruce Christianson
*Robert Peake *Robert Nisbet *Pam Job
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be obtained at
LG new poetry Autumn 2013 update
Please send submissions for the future issues to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and including a brief, 2-3 line, biography
Editor’s Introduction
Regular readers may notice that this issue has appeared a few days later than they might have expected. This is a consequence of my being away from my desk for several weeks while doing some quite extensive travelling this summer. One port of call was the Bridges 2013 conference in Enschede, Holland which was concerned with ways in which mathematics can interact with art, music and poetry. During a four-day meeting, it was a pleasure to listen to and read with a group of mathematically-oriented poets from many parts of the world; and I hope to be able to feature some of them in future issues of London Grip New Poetry.
Having read my own summer editorial, I have decided to include a number of images in this latest posting. I shall be interested to have readers’ reactions to this extra visual content. The images I have chosen are suggested quite directly by the poems alongside which they appear. In particular, the poem by Pam Job has given me the excuse to display work by the artist David Walsh whose strong, stark paintings in hot, fierce colours have intrigued me for many years.
All the above domestic matters have, of course, been overshadowed by the sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney a few days before this issue was posted. We mourn the loss of this great poet whose graciousness will be missed by all who knew him. There is a bitter-sweetness in the thought that the many tributes that have marked his passing will surely persuade even more people, perhaps belatedly, to give his work the attention it deserves.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/
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Rodney Wood: When Writing
use a Moleskine notebook and Visconti pen, keep a daily journal, a candle burning
always wear a fez , an item of corduroy, use a Moleskine notebook and Visconti pen
always wear a fez, an item of corduroy, keep a daily journal, a candle burning
you will no longer fear your body, drink water blessed by the moon
at your desk strip naked you will no longer fear your body
at your desk strip naked, drink water blessed by the moon
3 parts each of orris root, patchouli and benzoin, 5 parts of cinnamon and myrrh
use ritual incense 3 parts each of orris root, patchouli and benzoin
use ritual incense 5 parts of cinnamon and myrrh
Rodney Wood took up writing seriously again in 2006 when he retired early from work. In 2013 he was shortlisted in the Poetry School Pamphlet Competition and was one of Poets of the Week at Poetrysuperhighway in June of the same year.
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F.M. Brown: Implications
I am old enough to remember black-leaded stoves
Therefore I am interesting
You are old enough to have black-leaded the stoves
Therefore you are old
I think I may once have been sent to buy black-lead
Therefore I am the genuine article
You do not know what black-lead is
Therefore you are a southerner
I write poems about black-lead
You read them
Therefore one of us is a pretentious prat.
Being born in Yorkshire was the first defining event in F.M.Brown’s life. A second one was a move south to Bedfordshire which subsequently triggered a steady output of poems.
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Rik Wilkinson: Interior Design
For Raj – remembering the Interior Design Graduates’ Exhibition in Kingston, 1985
I
Why worry about the coming of CAD? *
Surely, it's only a few backward steps
to the invention of the pencil!
An event which shook a few charcoal burners
but the human imagination just loved it.
The lecturer praised your drawings,
only regretting the schism between reality
and graphics. He wished (let us guess)
you could conjure up a hologram
life-size for clients to walk about in.
Oh, yes! That day will come.
Seen from two days distance,
the graphics – brilliant wall displays – blend
in my imagination to a matrix of lines;
an after-image on the lidded retina.
But just perceptible on the screen of insight
tremulous heart-beats of doubt tick, tick, tick . . .
and something tells me the Design Exhibition
was a kind of Masque.
Ah, yes, Tyrannical Commerce was there, wearing
the spurs of unemployment. His eyes on Art
(pink hair, carefully torn jeans) discussing with
Thrusting Designer (stubble, red braces) the veracity
of image and context : that chair perceived in this room . . .
the room's ambience conditioned by the ethos . . .
Amateur Wordsmith (quill, bottle-green cloak)
stood listening, and the wine flowing from drawing to drawing
led him to consider
the relativity of dreams . . .
II
The Relativity of Dreams (completed in 2012)
I have explored this province of uncertainty
for many years. Searching for resolution
I created multiform images of virtual light
assembling towers of untold metres from which
nothing could be seen. I scanned bridges
without foundation. Surveyed emptiness.
Processed measures for elaborate cities
whose walls expired around me. I invigilated
phantasmagoria, scrolling acres
of incomprehensible truth.
Now, armed only with approximate words,
I mark out an arena – a domain
of human dimensions where the matter whirls
like laughter in the time-wind . . .
Locked out/Locked in, the stark words sing;
trapped particles race the Accelerator Ring.
And at the Existential Core . . . Ah, yes -
we practice Art, against our Nothingness.
* CAD = Computer Aided Design
Born on the backside of Ilkley Moor, Rik Wilkinson was considered too thick to go to Grammar School, but got 3 O Levels at the Secondary Tech. – just enough to get a job with the Ordnance Survey, scampering about the British Isles revising One Inch maps. Then he met a girl who told him he could write poetry. “Sod off,” he said, but got interested anyway, and eventually he went up to Oxford to study Literature.
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Sissy Buckles: Reality check
My dad served in the Korean war,
pulled a Neal Cassady car stealin’ joy ride
in Des Moines and got caught
back then the judge gave them a choice
of jail or the Marines.
I used to love to hear his old war stories until
one time he showed me a photo of his platoon
row upon row about a hundred
beautiful young fresh faced marines
and told me he was the only one
who came back alive,
and remembered how Marilyn Monroe
took time out from her honeymoon
to Joe DiMaggio and entertain before
U.S. Service members despite her
unrelenting anxiety for live performance,
his buddies all rushing the stage while she
waved and threw kisses
to a bunch of homesick guys.
And there was this Colonel
I worked with at my last job
he surfs the Oceanside break
and his best memory of Vietnam
was flying his chopper
over a massive dolphin pod
churning through the sea.
So one day at work
they were celebrating the USMC birthday
he pulled out this big ass sword
that he was going to cut the cake with
and when I told him where my dad served,
his soft brown eyes suddenly darker,
he said "oh, Korea,
that's a whole other story".
Sissy Buckles writes “When I am not working, I play my ukulele on the front porch in Lemon Grove, CA, drink beer, hunt for vintage, write hot rod poetry, and try to make better choices. My poems can be found in various online and print magazines including Rusty Truck, Litsnack and Askew Poetry Journal.
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Robert Etty: Like A Story By H.E.Bates
I was walking along a country road, but without
an old knapsack or broken heart, and with somewhere
in mind to go. I’m not on the run, or a winsome drifter
who’ll happily give any job his best shot, and I’m closer
to ninety than twenty. Swallows were wheeling and
swerving, but not in such numbers, I noticed, this year.
The soupy brown canal rippled idly. My digital watch
read 14.02. For more than an hour the sun had blazed
down, but rain would soon teem from a purple sky.
A black Chevrolet 4x4 steered round me, churning up
gravel that chinked as it rolled.
On the opposite side, a young woman appeared,
pushing a silver buggy. Why was she in this place,
so far from town, passing only a tidy bungalow
or a farm with no one in sight? Perhaps if I’d heard
the 2.25 puffing into the station through the fields
to take her and baby out to the coast ... But that
would have been the station I’d walked from, if there’d
been a station there. She agreed that the afternoon
was nice, and became a pale smudge behind me.
There wasn’t a pub called The Lock Keeper’s Arms
behind the spinney a mile ahead where I took the time
to sip a light ale, and a lean man named Archie kept
his own counsel and half an unwelcoming eye on me.
There wasn’t a BP filling station, or someone kneeling
weeding a grave, or a cat that was too hot to move
from a wall. Elderflower scented the thick summer air,
but the tractor I’d seen trundling over the verge had
scythed down the hemlock and meadowsweet.
I wished I’d been driving a blue Foden lorry
so I could park by the transport cafe and make up for
working my dinner hour. The waitress (30-ish, wavy
dark hair and a smile she’d learned to be sparing with)
would touch my hand when she had no need as she
served me sausage and eggs. As I paid, she’d say
Pop in again and I would, in my car towards sunset
one Saturday, and that’s how we’d begin.
But I was on foot, and those long marsh roads are
much too lonely for transport cafes. In other respects,
it was straight off the page.
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Robert Etty: Pavement Level
In Costa they’re letting their lattes go cold
to gaze at the entertainment outside.
A woman has been unable to move
since she fell on her side near the kerb.
The tall man who’s elbowed through onlookers
kneels by her and asks if this happens often.
She says (with tremendous presence of mind),
On balance, no, she prefers standing up.
He comforts her shoulder. Some watchers pretend
they’re not watching at all. The ambulance
is taking its time. Her cheek’s compressed
on a glove someone’s tucked there and drizzle’s
gluing her hair. Underneath her’s her coat,
shoeprints and her own dimensions in slabs
laid on aggregate, concrete and sand.
Below this there’s subsoil with earthworms in it,
and roots, rims of cooking pots, kneecaps
and jawbones, and deeper (sub-subsoil),
less soil and more rock. Siren sounds swell
and shop fronts the ambulance hasn’t reached yet
are Mexican-waving in flashing blue.
The woman who couldn’t move can’t move still.
She’s gaining a fresher perspective on legs,
but the leg-owners find horizontalness
unsettling on a pavement. So it’s quite a relief
when the paramedics descend with a stretcher
and stretch her out, tilt her and rush her off
somewhere, and everyone’s vertical again.
Robert Etty’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and in eight collections. He has read recently at the Museums at Night event in Grimsby and at the Cley Little Poetry Festival in Norfolk.
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Antony Johae: Skating in Kuwait
You see them coached to spin and turn
to form fine figures on sharp blades,
girls with lithe legs and supple frames
taught by women who may once have reigned
on rinks remote as Rome, Rio and Kyoto.
These novices learn about the body’s balance
bend of leg, stretch of arms
in practice daily on Soor’s frozen water.
Here my daughter sprawled one melting afternoon
and I, old-jointed, joined her gingerly
holding fast at first to cool rail
while boys whizzed past on fast blades
like cars on Jahra and on Fintas roads
reminding me of Saddam’s men who here
brought broken corpses to the morgue.
There’s a girl now taken by the ice
taking to it. She’s seen
those skaters reach for the air
in figures of three, eight and Dervish whirls
and now she’s out there mirroring their moves –
not fine-footed in loaned boots
with blunt blades and collapsed ankles
but elated , notwithstanding, arms
beating like wild swans
wheeling in great broken rings.
Only, not like them, she’s in abaya black
(no ugly duckling though), scarf-covered
imagining lithe glides, pirouettes,
three leaps, the bell-beat of wings,
her figure flying on ice.
Antony Johae has lived and taught literature in England, Germany, Ghana, Tunisia and Kuwait. He is now writing freelance in Lebanon. His latest collection is Poems of the East and poems from theis collection have appeared, or will appear, in Poetry and Audience, Earth Love, Weyfarers, Dial 174, Other Poetry, The New Verse News and EEK!
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Ruth Bidgood: Gulls’ Voices
A steep road curves down – to the sea?
If it is there, it’s hidden
by a high wall, but all the time
I hear crying of gulls.
On the right,
small houses, some stone-grey,
some whitewashed.
At the corner
of a side-lane, an empty shop,
window’s ornate frame
picked out in gold,
green door shut.
This is what I came for –
our meeting-place?
I am too late.
My disappointment is loud
in the gulls’ cries, dulls
trim cottages, fades hope
of onwardness for the road.
This is a dead end, full-stopped
by the hidden sea.
Was there ever a life
in which the true story
went otherwise?
What I see, hear, is surely
a fantasy of regret.
Is there a rebel dream
where the door opens?
What might I hear then
in the voices of gulls?
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Ruth Bidgood: Ambivalence
‘I believe
she’s twenty’, I say,
and mean ‘I’m not sure’.
‘I believe
God made the world’, she says,
and means he did,
no scrap of doubt.
I love the ambivalence
of words, of this,
that surely should hold
certainty. I love the way
‘I don’t quite know’ is one
with ‘I know for sure’.
Is this where to find
truth? In the box
with Schroedinger’s cat,
poisoned now, silent, stiff,
and furrily stretching now,
miaowing?
Ruth Bidgood lives in Mid-Wales. Her most recent collection is Above the Forests (Cinnamon, 2012), which was launched jointly with a study of her poetry by Matthew Jarvis (UWP,2012).
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Elizabeth Smither: The wedding party of animals
The old cat with the tumour on his brow
will wear a waistcoat and a bow-tie.
The tumour, removed, re-grows and blends
into the tigerish stripes of fur.
The farm dogs too, who at another wedding barked
furiously, from a barn, as rings were exchanged
will hopefully sit near the cat, adorned
in neck ruffs, a dickey, and a tie.
Impossible to tell the bride it may not be
perfect or even possible on the day.
The tumour, black and shiny, is no excuse
not to chase. A tangled tie may droop
underneath a paw. The animals’ role
may be mayhem but entertain
the guests with champagne in their hands
showing animals’ love is unashamed.
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Elizabeth Smither: Eyebrows, toenails
Eyebrows, toenails, the either ends of Jeny
today will be attended to by the beautician.
Toenails first, I imagine. Jeny on a footstool
looking perhaps at a print on the wall, a curtain
moving in the air. The little moon shapes fall
and are swept up. Now the dye
for the beautifully arched, slightly quizzical eyebrows
that Jeny always wears. Not a questioning
Why are we here, why have eyebrows at all?
but a shared amusement: a moon
on either side. Even in maintenance
there is a perfection of sorts. Jeny
rises and walks. Her sandalled toes
when summer comes show extra flesh
her eyebrows gleam (the dye takes
weeks to fade) on her bright face.
Jeny Curnow, a distinguished scholar and wife of the eminent New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow, was amused that age brought these two cosmetic procedures, one at either end of the body.
Elizabeth Smither’s latest publication is a collection of poems, The Blue Coat, published by Auckland University Press in April 2013.
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Elizabeth Barrett: Foot
Do I remember this from Sunday School:
that Jesus cast out seven devils from Magdalene
and how her love for him was steadfast then,
a certain thing? Was she the one who poured
a pound of ointment over his feet –
the house filling with the odour of spikenard –
then gathered up her hair, wiped them clean?
I cannot get it out of my head: the way
you grasped the arch of my foot that night,
held it. The foot I can’t recall being held before –
though maybe once my mother cradled it.
The closeness of this – more intimate than my
scars or cage of ribs. To be held by the foot –
anointed with a certain kind of love.
Elizabeth Barrett has published four collections of poetry, most recently A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc, 2010).
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Sonam Chhoki: The Witness
Bitter gourd vines
climb to the sky
unfurl their tendrils
in drifts of mists …
like you, now a wraith
I meet only in dreams.
I've built chambers
with double-bar doors
and yet you linger
in this in-between place
where night and day
are mere markings
on a clock face.
Over the iced river
the old cantilever bridge rises and falls
to the dust of bunioned-feet pilgrims.
The clicking-clacking of prayer beads,
the flapping-slapping of silken banners
are the sole mantras I now offer.
This full moon, as no other
before her, is my witness.
Born and brought up in Bhutan, Sonam Chhoki is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education. Her Japanese short form poetry have been published in anthologies in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, UK and US.
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Deborah Tyler-Bennett: Night (After William Hogarth)
For Ian Blake
Know city ghosts, their sighs and adorations,
bad-starred behaviour, coarsest spitting.
Night gathers, now the Barber’s lit twelve candles,
one stuck in every square of window-pane
abetting him in razoring and gossip.
Night gathering, the piss-pot being emptied
goes over his strutting Lordship (howl
fit to raise anatomists’ flayed men)
till you might ask what need
this city has for ghosts?
Yet, here they step, moonlight silver-foiling inn-
signs, Barber’s-pole and newest Bagnio,
here they come: Miss Careless; shadow crew,
long-dead in illest-gotten finery
roaring … on the pull …
…Backed by Little Cazey, capering,
living link-boys shudder, coat-tails tugged.
Miss Careless touches hands with the night-soil carter,
his skin cold-tightening as if raw snowflakes fell,
seeing an unmarked grave, a floury face
considers if the spirit of Ann Bell
haunts her last Bagnio? Knows if some scumbag client
knifed him, he’d range back
to horrify and chill the grimy place –
murder leaving sorry aftertaste
Miss Careless, Little Cazey, poor Ann Bell,
brimming city yielding what remains,
their ink-pots, cold-cream lids, smashed porcelain,
night gathering, old play-ground excavated,
gives up its white-faced tea-bowls, and its ghosts.
Betsey Careless and Ann Bell were harlots, Ann being killed by blood-poisoning after a client stabbed her, Little Cazey was Betsey’s hooligan link-boy. Bagnio’s were bath-houses of ill-repute.
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Deborah Tyler-Bennett has had four volumes of poetry published: Clark Gable in Mansfield (King’s England), Pavilion (Smokestack), Mytton … Dyer.. Sweet Billy Gibson (Nine Arches) and Revudeville (King’s England). She regularly performs her work and her first collection of short fictions, Turned Out Nice Again: Stories Inspired by the Music Hall Tradition is due from King’s England in Summer 2013. A chapbook based on work inspired by her time as a resident writer at Keats House, Kinda Keats, is due out from Shoestring in 2014. ‘Night’ comes from a sequence ‘The Ladies of Harris’s List’ based in the eighteenth-century, and is after a painting by Hogarth.
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Shadwell Smith: Roy Lichtenstein’s “Thinking of Him” (1963)
This was Hollywood hung in primary colours.
Daddy’s little princess turned out with the trash
by a fast young man who could wear a suit
and shoot the breeze from the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville.
Your baby doesn’t love you anymore.
Candy waits for Brad to call, her thoughts full
of his blue serge suit and player’s jaw.
A cheated sweetheart not quite pretty or complete;
her yellow hair throws curves and she cries silver.
You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore.
A thin faced New Yorker stands in front of her
neurosis stretched across his canvas sheet;
and Roy declares in hard black lines
a scene with dots that replicate a moment –
It’s over.
It’s over.
It’s over.
Shadwell Smith spends most of his time teaching history under a different name. He has had poems published in Snakeskin and Ink, Sweat and Tears and is very pleased to have found such a good home for this one.
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Jonathan Taylor: The Bohemian Girl, 1936
Arline dreams she dwells in marble halls,
whilst Uncle Stanley munches toast.
She also dreams, which pleases her most,
Daddy-Olly loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same:
Uncle surreptitiously sipping his tea,
half-interested in her song, like Breakfast T.V.
She dreams out of shutters at palatial snow,
of a dozen knights upon bended knee
(Uncle lancing boiled eggs with his fork)
one of them proposing from that noble host.
She also dreams, which charms her most,
Daddy-Olly loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same:
Uncle awkwardly swallowing his tea,
half-interested in her song, like Breakfast T.V.,
toast-buttering unbothered by Olly’s tears,
never mind any death-curse in the song,
which might monoxide Thelma Todd,
marbling whole orchestras into a mausoleum –
it’s enough to whistle it under a proscenium,
or maybe even mention it in this poem ….
So I’ll just sit with Stanley and share his toast,
letting her dream what beguiles her most:
that he loves her, he loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same.
The Bohemian Girl, originally a nineteenth-century operetta by Michael Balfe, was adapted as a comic film in the 1930s, starring Laurel and Hardy as two hapless gypsies together with Thelma Todd, in one of her last roles, and Jacqueline Wells as the soprano heroine, Arline. It is Arline who sings the most famous aria, ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,’ to Laurel and Hardy, whilst the former is eating his breakfast. According to superstition, the aria is said to bring bad luck to performers and players when whistled or sung in a theatre. The actress Thelma Todd died of carbon monoxide poisoning during the production of The Bohemian Girl. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26tIOTH2u4g
Jonathan Taylor is author of the poetry collection, Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013), the novel Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher, Crystal Clear Creators. See also www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
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Robert Peake: Seraphim
You think of us in bright medieval paintings,
our flat profiles ascending and descending ladders.
And slender, robed in cinnabar, announcing from stage
right or praising God in cartoon bubbles flipped
upside-down to be read more easily from above.
But come with me to the bridge at night, where couples
stroll over the brown-black Thames, haloed by domes
and spires, the spoked and spinning blue Eye.
Look closely down the railing. There she is.
We travel the chilled air, whispering: don't do it.
We are the shiver of thought, that the money or lover
might return, the painful illness be cured. And when
they jump, we are the warmth in hypothermia,
the ones in the brain's control room, turning the knobs
of the visible scene, hastening the fade to black.
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Robert Peake: Robin
Bold and scruffy, slashing into view,
tiny courtier teeming with invidious mites,
we welcome you at the waterspout, bent sprig,
weaving a maypole out of long oat grass.
You wear a red-crossed breast, poor Templar,
far from healthy with your half-feathered head,
blandishing the cold-snapped air, informing
and interpreting the seasons like a wild-eyed monk.
You preach through the frost and meandering drizzle,
moot points of theology and tactics with squirrels,
piecemeal captain of our sinking green ship,
perched like Nelson at the tallest crow's nest.
Guide us, our skipper, saint and troubadour, head-
long into the Winter that you know will be your last.
Robert Peake is an American poet living in England. His poems have appeared in North American Review and Magma Poetry.
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Robert Nisbet: nearly sleeping, you’ve just left
You brought me a copy
of Joyce’s Dubliners, two
satsumas, an afternoon
of company, contentment,
a room’s rumpled bedclothes,
and the promise of our autumn
and I’m left for now to my
greening garden, a jackdaw
lining up her pride of young,
the whole fat cluster of them
alarmed, dropping into flight.
Like us, taking wing.
Robert Nisbet, who lives in Pembrokeshire, has taught English and creative writing at a college of education, in two grammar schools, three comprehensives, for two universities and in a raft of adult education centres. He has published just over 100 short stories and nearly 100 poems
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Bruce Christianson: Just A Few Minutes Then
death keeps odd hours
his new landlady
has taped a note
to the fridge
he never uses
they've found
another lump
it says followed
helpfully
by the ward number
visiting time is ending
as he arrives
death hands a blonde
staff nurse the note
& looks hopeful
Bruce Christianson was born in Whangarei, grew up in New Zealand, and trained as a mathematician before moving to Hertfordshire, where he has taught for twenty-six years. He and death are reconciled.
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Pam Job: Day Without End
What is nightfall?
A dying sun hangs in a burnt-out sky.
We have forgotten what it is
not to blister; not to hunt
shadows into corners.
We are light-blind, sun-struck,
shrivelled into thick skins,
our feet soled with horn.
Who remembers dewfall
or the green whisper of grasses
or a violet evening seeding its first star?
Who can sing the morning calls of birds,
echo the owls' dark cry,
count the scales on a butterfly's wing?
We dream these things back,
some of us, sometimes,
in what could be spring.
Pam Job is on the Poetry Wivenhoe team, a local Essex group which has recently celebrated its sixth year of staging monthly live poetry readings with nationally known poets and which also provides a showcase for local poets. She has co- edited two anthologies resulting from poetry competitions, and the KJV anthology celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. She has three poems in a new anthology commemorating the outbreak of WW1 to be published in autumn 2013. She won the Fakenham Poetry Competition in 2010, the Crabbe competition in 2013 and was also commended in the 2013 Second Light competition
The picture accompanying this poem is by the London-based Australian artist David Walsh
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Sep 3 2013
London Grip New Poetry – Autumn 2013
*
This issue of London Grip New Poetry features poems by:
*Rodney Wood *F.M.Brown *Rik Wilkinson *Sissy Buckles *Robert Etty *Antony Johae
*Ruth Bidgood *Elizabeth Smither *Elizabeth Barrett *Sonam Chhoki
*Deborah Tyler-Bennett *Shadwell Smith *Jonathan Taylor *Bruce Christianson
*Robert Peake *Robert Nisbet *Pam Job
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be obtained at
LG new poetry Autumn 2013 update
Please send submissions for the future issues to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and including a brief, 2-3 line, biography
Editor’s Introduction
Regular readers may notice that this issue has appeared a few days later than they might have expected. This is a consequence of my being away from my desk for several weeks while doing some quite extensive travelling this summer. One port of call was the Bridges 2013 conference in Enschede, Holland which was concerned with ways in which mathematics can interact with art, music and poetry. During a four-day meeting, it was a pleasure to listen to and read with a group of mathematically-oriented poets from many parts of the world; and I hope to be able to feature some of them in future issues of London Grip New Poetry.
Having read my own summer editorial, I have decided to include a number of images in this latest posting. I shall be interested to have readers’ reactions to this extra visual content. The images I have chosen are suggested quite directly by the poems alongside which they appear. In particular, the poem by Pam Job has given me the excuse to display work by the artist David Walsh whose strong, stark paintings in hot, fierce colours have intrigued me for many years.
All the above domestic matters have, of course, been overshadowed by the sad news of the death of Seamus Heaney a few days before this issue was posted. We mourn the loss of this great poet whose graciousness will be missed by all who knew him. There is a bitter-sweetness in the thought that the many tributes that have marked his passing will surely persuade even more people, perhaps belatedly, to give his work the attention it deserves.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/
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Rodney Wood: When Writing
use a Moleskine notebook and Visconti pen, keep a daily journal, a candle burning always wear a fez , an item of corduroy, use a Moleskine notebook and Visconti pen always wear a fez, an item of corduroy, keep a daily journal, a candle burning you will no longer fear your body, drink water blessed by the moon at your desk strip naked you will no longer fear your body at your desk strip naked, drink water blessed by the moon 3 parts each of orris root, patchouli and benzoin, 5 parts of cinnamon and myrrh use ritual incense 3 parts each of orris root, patchouli and benzoin use ritual incense 5 parts of cinnamon and myrrhRodney Wood took up writing seriously again in 2006 when he retired early from work. In 2013 he was shortlisted in the Poetry School Pamphlet Competition and was one of Poets of the Week at Poetrysuperhighway in June of the same year.
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F.M. Brown: Implications
I am old enough to remember black-leaded stoves
Therefore I am interesting
You are old enough to have black-leaded the stoves
Therefore you are old
I think I may once have been sent to buy black-lead
Therefore I am the genuine article
You do not know what black-lead is
Therefore you are a southerner
I write poems about black-lead
You read them
Therefore one of us is a pretentious prat.Being born in Yorkshire was the first defining event in F.M.Brown’s life. A second one was a move south to Bedfordshire which subsequently triggered a steady output of poems.
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Rik Wilkinson: Interior Design
For Raj – remembering the Interior Design Graduates’ Exhibition in Kingston, 1985
I Why worry about the coming of CAD? * Surely, it's only a few backward steps to the invention of the pencil! An event which shook a few charcoal burners but the human imagination just loved it. The lecturer praised your drawings, only regretting the schism between reality and graphics. He wished (let us guess) you could conjure up a hologram life-size for clients to walk about in. Oh, yes! That day will come. Seen from two days distance, the graphics – brilliant wall displays – blend in my imagination to a matrix of lines; an after-image on the lidded retina. But just perceptible on the screen of insight tremulous heart-beats of doubt tick, tick, tick . . . and something tells me the Design Exhibition was a kind of Masque. Ah, yes, Tyrannical Commerce was there, wearing the spurs of unemployment. His eyes on Art (pink hair, carefully torn jeans) discussing with Thrusting Designer (stubble, red braces) the veracity of image and context : that chair perceived in this room . . . the room's ambience conditioned by the ethos . . . Amateur Wordsmith (quill, bottle-green cloak) stood listening, and the wine flowing from drawing to drawing led him to consider the relativity of dreams . . . II The Relativity of Dreams (completed in 2012) I have explored this province of uncertainty for many years. Searching for resolution I created multiform images of virtual light assembling towers of untold metres from which nothing could be seen. I scanned bridges without foundation. Surveyed emptiness. Processed measures for elaborate cities whose walls expired around me. I invigilated phantasmagoria, scrolling acres of incomprehensible truth. Now, armed only with approximate words, I mark out an arena – a domain of human dimensions where the matter whirls like laughter in the time-wind . . . Locked out/Locked in, the stark words sing; trapped particles race the Accelerator Ring. And at the Existential Core . . . Ah, yes - we practice Art, against our Nothingness.* CAD = Computer Aided Design
Born on the backside of Ilkley Moor, Rik Wilkinson was considered too thick to go to Grammar School, but got 3 O Levels at the Secondary Tech. – just enough to get a job with the Ordnance Survey, scampering about the British Isles revising One Inch maps. Then he met a girl who told him he could write poetry. “Sod off,” he said, but got interested anyway, and eventually he went up to Oxford to study Literature.
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Sissy Buckles: Reality check
My dad served in the Korean war, pulled a Neal Cassady car stealin’ joy ride in Des Moines and got caught back then the judge gave them a choice of jail or the Marines. I used to love to hear his old war stories until one time he showed me a photo of his platoon row upon row about a hundred beautiful young fresh faced marines and told me he was the only one who came back alive, and remembered how Marilyn Monroe took time out from her honeymoon to Joe DiMaggio and entertain before U.S. Service members despite her unrelenting anxiety for live performance, his buddies all rushing the stage while she waved and threw kisses to a bunch of homesick guys. And there was this Colonel I worked with at my last job he surfs the Oceanside break and his best memory of Vietnam was flying his chopper over a massive dolphin pod churning through the sea. So one day at work they were celebrating the USMC birthday he pulled out this big ass sword that he was going to cut the cake with and when I told him where my dad served, his soft brown eyes suddenly darker, he said "oh, Korea, that's a whole other story".Sissy Buckles writes “When I am not working, I play my ukulele on the front porch in Lemon Grove, CA, drink beer, hunt for vintage, write hot rod poetry, and try to make better choices. My poems can be found in various online and print magazines including Rusty Truck, Litsnack and Askew Poetry Journal.
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Robert Etty: Like A Story By H.E.Bates
I was walking along a country road, but without an old knapsack or broken heart, and with somewhere in mind to go. I’m not on the run, or a winsome drifter who’ll happily give any job his best shot, and I’m closer to ninety than twenty. Swallows were wheeling and swerving, but not in such numbers, I noticed, this year. The soupy brown canal rippled idly. My digital watch read 14.02. For more than an hour the sun had blazed down, but rain would soon teem from a purple sky. A black Chevrolet 4x4 steered round me, churning up gravel that chinked as it rolled. On the opposite side, a young woman appeared, pushing a silver buggy. Why was she in this place, so far from town, passing only a tidy bungalow or a farm with no one in sight? Perhaps if I’d heard the 2.25 puffing into the station through the fields to take her and baby out to the coast ... But that would have been the station I’d walked from, if there’d been a station there. She agreed that the afternoon was nice, and became a pale smudge behind me. There wasn’t a pub called The Lock Keeper’s Arms behind the spinney a mile ahead where I took the time to sip a light ale, and a lean man named Archie kept his own counsel and half an unwelcoming eye on me. There wasn’t a BP filling station, or someone kneeling weeding a grave, or a cat that was too hot to move from a wall. Elderflower scented the thick summer air, but the tractor I’d seen trundling over the verge had scythed down the hemlock and meadowsweet. I wished I’d been driving a blue Foden lorry so I could park by the transport cafe and make up for working my dinner hour. The waitress (30-ish, wavy dark hair and a smile she’d learned to be sparing with) would touch my hand when she had no need as she served me sausage and eggs. As I paid, she’d say Pop in again and I would, in my car towards sunset one Saturday, and that’s how we’d begin. But I was on foot, and those long marsh roads are much too lonely for transport cafes. In other respects, it was straight off the page. .Back to poet list… Forward to next poem
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Robert Etty: Pavement Level
In Costa they’re letting their lattes go cold to gaze at the entertainment outside. A woman has been unable to move since she fell on her side near the kerb. The tall man who’s elbowed through onlookers kneels by her and asks if this happens often. She says (with tremendous presence of mind), On balance, no, she prefers standing up. He comforts her shoulder. Some watchers pretend they’re not watching at all. The ambulance is taking its time. Her cheek’s compressed on a glove someone’s tucked there and drizzle’s gluing her hair. Underneath her’s her coat, shoeprints and her own dimensions in slabs laid on aggregate, concrete and sand. Below this there’s subsoil with earthworms in it, and roots, rims of cooking pots, kneecaps and jawbones, and deeper (sub-subsoil), less soil and more rock. Siren sounds swell and shop fronts the ambulance hasn’t reached yet are Mexican-waving in flashing blue. The woman who couldn’t move can’t move still. She’s gaining a fresher perspective on legs, but the leg-owners find horizontalness unsettling on a pavement. So it’s quite a relief when the paramedics descend with a stretcher and stretch her out, tilt her and rush her off somewhere, and everyone’s vertical again.Robert Etty’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and in eight collections. He has read recently at the Museums at Night event in Grimsby and at the Cley Little Poetry Festival in Norfolk.
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Antony Johae: Skating in Kuwait
You see them coached to spin and turn to form fine figures on sharp blades, girls with lithe legs and supple frames taught by women who may once have reigned on rinks remote as Rome, Rio and Kyoto. These novices learn about the body’s balance bend of leg, stretch of arms in practice daily on Soor’s frozen water. Here my daughter sprawled one melting afternoon and I, old-jointed, joined her gingerly holding fast at first to cool rail while boys whizzed past on fast blades like cars on Jahra and on Fintas roads reminding me of Saddam’s men who here brought broken corpses to the morgue. There’s a girl now taken by the ice taking to it. She’s seen those skaters reach for the air in figures of three, eight and Dervish whirls and now she’s out there mirroring their moves – not fine-footed in loaned boots with blunt blades and collapsed ankles but elated , notwithstanding, arms beating like wild swans wheeling in great broken rings. Only, not like them, she’s in abaya black (no ugly duckling though), scarf-covered imagining lithe glides, pirouettes, three leaps, the bell-beat of wings, her figure flying on ice.Antony Johae has lived and taught literature in England, Germany, Ghana, Tunisia and Kuwait. He is now writing freelance in Lebanon. His latest collection is Poems of the East and poems from theis collection have appeared, or will appear, in Poetry and Audience, Earth Love, Weyfarers, Dial 174, Other Poetry, The New Verse News and EEK!
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Ruth Bidgood: Gulls’ Voices
A steep road curves down – to the sea? If it is there, it’s hidden by a high wall, but all the time I hear crying of gulls. On the right, small houses, some stone-grey, some whitewashed. At the corner of a side-lane, an empty shop, window’s ornate frame picked out in gold, green door shut. This is what I came for – our meeting-place? I am too late. My disappointment is loud in the gulls’ cries, dulls trim cottages, fades hope of onwardness for the road. This is a dead end, full-stopped by the hidden sea. Was there ever a life in which the true story went otherwise? What I see, hear, is surely a fantasy of regret. Is there a rebel dream where the door opens? What might I hear then in the voices of gulls? .Back to poet list… Forward to next poem
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Ruth Bidgood: Ambivalence
‘I believe she’s twenty’, I say, and mean ‘I’m not sure’. ‘I believe God made the world’, she says, and means he did, no scrap of doubt. I love the ambivalence of words, of this, that surely should hold certainty. I love the way ‘I don’t quite know’ is one with ‘I know for sure’. Is this where to find truth? In the box with Schroedinger’s cat, poisoned now, silent, stiff, and furrily stretching now, miaowing?Ruth Bidgood lives in Mid-Wales. Her most recent collection is Above the Forests (Cinnamon, 2012), which was launched jointly with a study of her poetry by Matthew Jarvis (UWP,2012).
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Elizabeth Smither: The wedding party of animals
The old cat with the tumour on his brow will wear a waistcoat and a bow-tie. The tumour, removed, re-grows and blends into the tigerish stripes of fur. The farm dogs too, who at another wedding barked furiously, from a barn, as rings were exchanged will hopefully sit near the cat, adorned in neck ruffs, a dickey, and a tie. Impossible to tell the bride it may not be perfect or even possible on the day. The tumour, black and shiny, is no excuse not to chase. A tangled tie may droop underneath a paw. The animals’ role may be mayhem but entertain the guests with champagne in their hands showing animals’ love is unashamed. .Back to poet list… Forward to next poem
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Elizabeth Smither: Eyebrows, toenails
Eyebrows, toenails, the either ends of Jeny today will be attended to by the beautician. Toenails first, I imagine. Jeny on a footstool looking perhaps at a print on the wall, a curtain moving in the air. The little moon shapes fall and are swept up. Now the dye for the beautifully arched, slightly quizzical eyebrows that Jeny always wears. Not a questioning Why are we here, why have eyebrows at all? but a shared amusement: a moon on either side. Even in maintenance there is a perfection of sorts. Jeny rises and walks. Her sandalled toes when summer comes show extra flesh her eyebrows gleam (the dye takes weeks to fade) on her bright face.Jeny Curnow, a distinguished scholar and wife of the eminent New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow, was amused that age brought these two cosmetic procedures, one at either end of the body.
Elizabeth Smither’s latest publication is a collection of poems, The Blue Coat, published by Auckland University Press in April 2013.
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Elizabeth Barrett: Foot
Do I remember this from Sunday School: that Jesus cast out seven devils from Magdalene and how her love for him was steadfast then, a certain thing? Was she the one who poured a pound of ointment over his feet – the house filling with the odour of spikenard – then gathered up her hair, wiped them clean? I cannot get it out of my head: the way you grasped the arch of my foot that night, held it. The foot I can’t recall being held before – though maybe once my mother cradled it. The closeness of this – more intimate than my scars or cage of ribs. To be held by the foot – anointed with a certain kind of love.Elizabeth Barrett has published four collections of poetry, most recently A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc, 2010).
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Sonam Chhoki: The Witness
Bitter gourd vines climb to the sky unfurl their tendrils in drifts of mists … like you, now a wraith I meet only in dreams. I've built chambers with double-bar doors and yet you linger in this in-between place where night and day are mere markings on a clock face. Over the iced river the old cantilever bridge rises and falls to the dust of bunioned-feet pilgrims. The clicking-clacking of prayer beads, the flapping-slapping of silken banners are the sole mantras I now offer. This full moon, as no other before her, is my witness.Born and brought up in Bhutan, Sonam Chhoki is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education. Her Japanese short form poetry have been published in anthologies in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, UK and US.
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Deborah Tyler-Bennett: Night (After William Hogarth)
For Ian Blake
Know city ghosts, their sighs and adorations,
bad-starred behaviour, coarsest spitting.
Night gathers, now the Barber’s lit twelve candles,
one stuck in every square of window-pane
abetting him in razoring and gossip.
Night gathering, the piss-pot being emptied
goes over his strutting Lordship (howl
fit to raise anatomists’ flayed men)
till you might ask what need
this city has for ghosts?
Yet, here they step, moonlight silver-foiling inn-
signs, Barber’s-pole and newest Bagnio,
here they come: Miss Careless; shadow crew,
long-dead in illest-gotten finery
roaring … on the pull …
…Backed by Little Cazey, capering,
living link-boys shudder, coat-tails tugged.
Miss Careless touches hands with the night-soil carter,
his skin cold-tightening as if raw snowflakes fell,
seeing an unmarked grave, a floury face
considers if the spirit of Ann Bell
haunts her last Bagnio? Knows if some scumbag client
knifed him, he’d range back
to horrify and chill the grimy place –
murder leaving sorry aftertaste
Miss Careless, Little Cazey, poor Ann Bell,
brimming city yielding what remains,
their ink-pots, cold-cream lids, smashed porcelain,
night gathering, old play-ground excavated,
gives up its white-faced tea-bowls, and its ghosts.Betsey Careless and Ann Bell were harlots, Ann being killed by blood-poisoning after a client stabbed her, Little Cazey was Betsey’s hooligan link-boy. Bagnio’s were bath-houses of ill-repute.
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Deborah Tyler-Bennett has had four volumes of poetry published: Clark Gable in Mansfield (King’s England), Pavilion (Smokestack), Mytton … Dyer.. Sweet Billy Gibson (Nine Arches) and Revudeville (King’s England). She regularly performs her work and her first collection of short fictions, Turned Out Nice Again: Stories Inspired by the Music Hall Tradition is due from King’s England in Summer 2013. A chapbook based on work inspired by her time as a resident writer at Keats House, Kinda Keats, is due out from Shoestring in 2014. ‘Night’ comes from a sequence ‘The Ladies of Harris’s List’ based in the eighteenth-century, and is after a painting by Hogarth.
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Shadwell Smith: Roy Lichtenstein’s “Thinking of Him” (1963)
This was Hollywood hung in primary colours.
Daddy’s little princess turned out with the trash
by a fast young man who could wear a suit
and shoot the breeze from the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville.
Your baby doesn’t love you anymore.
Candy waits for Brad to call, her thoughts full
of his blue serge suit and player’s jaw.
A cheated sweetheart not quite pretty or complete;
her yellow hair throws curves and she cries silver.
You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore.
A thin faced New Yorker stands in front of her
neurosis stretched across his canvas sheet;
and Roy declares in hard black lines
a scene with dots that replicate a moment –
It’s over.
It’s over.
It’s over.
Shadwell Smith spends most of his time teaching history under a different name. He has had poems published in Snakeskin and Ink, Sweat and Tears and is very pleased to have found such a good home for this one.
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Jonathan Taylor: The Bohemian Girl, 1936
Arline dreams she dwells in marble halls, whilst Uncle Stanley munches toast. She also dreams, which pleases her most,
Daddy-Olly loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same:
Uncle surreptitiously sipping his tea,
half-interested in her song, like Breakfast T.V.
She dreams out of shutters at palatial snow,
of a dozen knights upon bended knee
(Uncle lancing boiled eggs with his fork)
one of them proposing from that noble host.
She also dreams, which charms her most,
Daddy-Olly loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same:
Uncle awkwardly swallowing his tea,
half-interested in her song, like Breakfast T.V.,
toast-buttering unbothered by Olly’s tears,
never mind any death-curse in the song,
which might monoxide Thelma Todd,
marbling whole orchestras into a mausoleum –
it’s enough to whistle it under a proscenium,
or maybe even mention it in this poem ….
So I’ll just sit with Stanley and share his toast,
letting her dream what beguiles her most:
that he loves her, he loves her still the same,
that he loves her, he loves her still the same.The Bohemian Girl, originally a nineteenth-century operetta by Michael Balfe, was adapted as a comic film in the 1930s, starring Laurel and Hardy as two hapless gypsies together with Thelma Todd, in one of her last roles, and Jacqueline Wells as the soprano heroine, Arline. It is Arline who sings the most famous aria, ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,’ to Laurel and Hardy, whilst the former is eating his breakfast. According to superstition, the aria is said to bring bad luck to performers and players when whistled or sung in a theatre. The actress Thelma Todd died of carbon monoxide poisoning during the production of The Bohemian Girl. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26tIOTH2u4g
Jonathan Taylor is author of the poetry collection, Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013), the novel Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta, 2007). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher, Crystal Clear Creators. See also www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
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Robert Peake: Seraphim
You think of us in bright medieval paintings, our flat profiles ascending and descending ladders. And slender, robed in cinnabar, announcing from stage right or praising God in cartoon bubbles flipped upside-down to be read more easily from above. But come with me to the bridge at night, where couples stroll over the brown-black Thames, haloed by domes and spires, the spoked and spinning blue Eye. Look closely down the railing. There she is. We travel the chilled air, whispering: don't do it. We are the shiver of thought, that the money or lover might return, the painful illness be cured. And when they jump, we are the warmth in hypothermia, the ones in the brain's control room, turning the knobs of the visible scene, hastening the fade to black. .Back to poet list… Forward to next poem
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Robert Peake: Robin
Bold and scruffy, slashing into view, tiny courtier teeming with invidious mites, we welcome you at the waterspout, bent sprig, weaving a maypole out of long oat grass. You wear a red-crossed breast, poor Templar, far from healthy with your half-feathered head, blandishing the cold-snapped air, informing and interpreting the seasons like a wild-eyed monk. You preach through the frost and meandering drizzle, moot points of theology and tactics with squirrels, piecemeal captain of our sinking green ship, perched like Nelson at the tallest crow's nest. Guide us, our skipper, saint and troubadour, head- long into the Winter that you know will be your last.Robert Peake is an American poet living in England. His poems have appeared in North American Review and Magma Poetry.
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Robert Nisbet: nearly sleeping, you’ve just left
You brought me a copy of Joyce’s Dubliners, two satsumas, an afternoon of company, contentment, a room’s rumpled bedclothes, and the promise of our autumn and I’m left for now to my greening garden, a jackdaw lining up her pride of young, the whole fat cluster of them alarmed, dropping into flight. Like us, taking wing.Robert Nisbet, who lives in Pembrokeshire, has taught English and creative writing at a college of education, in two grammar schools, three comprehensives, for two universities and in a raft of adult education centres. He has published just over 100 short stories and nearly 100 poems
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Bruce Christianson: Just A Few Minutes Then
death keeps odd hours his new landlady has taped a note to the fridge he never uses they've found another lump it says followed helpfully by the ward number visiting time is ending as he arrives death hands a blonde staff nurse the note & looks hopefulBruce Christianson was born in Whangarei, grew up in New Zealand, and trained as a mathematician before moving to Hertfordshire, where he has taught for twenty-six years. He and death are reconciled.
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Pam Job: Day Without End
What is nightfall?
A dying sun hangs in a burnt-out sky.
We have forgotten what it is
not to blister; not to hunt
shadows into corners.
We are light-blind, sun-struck,
shrivelled into thick skins,
our feet soled with horn.
Who remembers dewfall
or the green whisper of grasses
or a violet evening seeding its first star?
Who can sing the morning calls of birds,
echo the owls' dark cry,
count the scales on a butterfly's wing?
We dream these things back,
some of us, sometimes,
in what could be spring.Pam Job is on the Poetry Wivenhoe team, a local Essex group which has recently celebrated its sixth year of staging monthly live poetry readings with nationally known poets and which also provides a showcase for local poets. She has co- edited two anthologies resulting from poetry competitions, and the KJV anthology celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. She has three poems in a new anthology commemorating the outbreak of WW1 to be published in autumn 2013. She won the Fakenham Poetry Competition in 2010, the Crabbe competition in 2013 and was also commended in the 2013 Second Light competition
The picture accompanying this poem is by the London-based Australian artist David Walsh
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