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The Summer 2023 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:
* Carla Scarano D’Antonio * Ken Pobo * James Thellusson * Glen Hunting
* Jacob Mckibbin * Jill Sharp * Baraa Alassi * Rustin Larson
* John Grey * John Bartlett * Phil Kirby * Jack Heslop
* Colin Ian Jeffery * Stuart Pickford * Michael O’Brien * Caleb Murdock
* Lesley Burt * Denise Bundred * Briege Duffaud * Paul Stephenson
*David Parsley * Konstandinos Mahoney * Benjamin Rosser * James Norcliffe
* Oleg Semonov * Julian Dobson * Vyacheslav Konoval * Colin Pink
* Alison Jones * Judith Wozniak * Maëlle Leggiadro * Nicola Carter
* Elizabeth Smither * Chrissie Gittins * Julie Gardner * Anthony Dolphin
* Bethany W Pope * Lynne Hjelmgaard * Robert Etty * Phil Connolly
* Karen Jane Cannon * Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana * Maggie Freeman * Jean Atkin
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors.
Biographical notes on contributors can be found here
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
A printer-friendly form of this issue can be found at LGNP Summer 2023
SUBMISSIONS: please send up to THREE poems to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Submission windows are: December-January, March-April, June-July
& September-October
Editor’s notes
From time to time our editorials have included a tribute to a poet whose death has recently been reported. This is never a happy task; but it is particularly poignant for us to be recording the sudden and very untimely loss of Carla Scarano D’Antonio in March this year. Carla was born in Italy but came to England in the early 2000s to do a Creative Writing MA at Lancaster University. She soon became well known on the UK poetry scene both for her published poetry and also for her frequent attendance – both in person and on-line – at poetry events, especially at Write Out Loud in Woking (whose website gives a fuller account of Carla’s life and work here).
Carla was a particularly loyal and enthusiastic contributor to London Grip. She was a regular reviewer of poetry collections and art exhibitions; and sometimes she also wrote interesting articles about her travels. Her poems have appeared frequently in our new poetry postings. Fortunately she had submitted a new batch of work shortly before her death and we open this issue with two of her poems and can enjoy her distinctive voice once more.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have recently been reflecting on the inadvisability of taking continuity for granted. This is our 48th posting of new poetry; and while it is highly probable that number 49 will follow in due course I am well aware it’s not inevitable! London Grip depends on the creative efforts of our contributors and the time-management skills of our volunteer staff – not to mention maintaining the computing infrastructure that makes publication possible. We can be grateful that these essential elements have all played their part so well for so long.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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Carla Scarano D’Antonio: On coming back home
A thin slice of crescent moon cuts the pale blue
early evening sky.
The roundabout is busy,
jammed with cars hurrying home.
I look up at its skinny shape.
I have faith it will bring me luck.
Carla Scarano D’Antonio; Tomorrow
After Frank O’Hara’s ‘Today’
Oh! Primark, Fat Face and H&M
you are so exciting! Starbucks cappuccino,
bingo at the Italian club
art classes in person
yoga at a safe distance
and finally the magic of swimming again,
the ecstasy of being weightless and suspended.
Now I know that
these things are with me every day
reforming my life despite the indoor lapse;
they are as powerful as dreams.
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Ken Pobo: Dear Frank O’Hara
I overlook the fact that you’re
dead—we all have something—
and send you greetings from
the temporarily living. Maybe
you’re drinking a shaken,
not stirred, martini with
Ava Gardner at a charming
deuce, a single rosebud
in a vase. Ava has many
stories about stars—
she’ll provoke a giggle talking
about Barnard’s Star, a red
dwarf with a wandering eye.
I’ll be joining you too,
I’m not sure how, the traffic
between life and death is
murder, but please save me
a seat and alert the waiter.
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James Thellusson : Trowel
In memory of Allan Ginsberg -- born in June 1926.
A tongue in cheek homage to his famous poem Howl
to coincide with the anniversary of his birth.
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by gardening,
hysterically planting invasive species,
dragging themselves through the aisles of B&Q on Sundays looking for an ericaceous fix,
deadheading hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry flower beds of the night,
who retired too early and pie-eyed sat up vaping Rooibos in the well-mulched darkness
of their Semis contemplating cold water features in Country Life,
who staked out their brains in Gardener’s World and dreamt of Titchmarsh,
like an angel, dancing on potting sheds illuminated,
who passed their evenings with radish red eyes hallucinating Babylon’s Hanging Gardens
or Macbeth-like disputes with the committee of the allotment,
who were expelled from the Royal Horticultural Society for crazy paving patios,
dangling baskets of dead succulents in bay windows
to spite their neighbours,
who cowered unshaven in conservatories in quilted gilets, burning pensions
with poor insulation, shouting at the terrier in the hall,
(but never mowed in May),
who got busted for their grey hair returning through Heathrow
with a belt of weed from Wisley,
who knitted hemp and drank nettle wine behind living hedge rows,
for purgatoried themselves, night after night, with schemes
for rewilding, weaving pergolas from ethereal hawthorn
or building incandescent polytunnels in the Cloud,
who chained themselves to forest canopies, pelting Police with daffodils,
before jumping into their arms as the coppice is cut down,
who talked continuously seventy hours of Don and Gaia and Net Zero,
stoned on the gypsum of their consciences,
who blossomed into a wild meadow of horticultural activists
passing out incomprehensible leaflets about Dutch hydroponics
and organic cures for blight,
who whispered knowledgeably about soil acidity without a PhD
and cried whenever they passed a bed of Chrysanthemums
or a compost heap
and pilgrimaged regularly to Kew,
who study The Carefree Gardener anxious to develop capabilities like Brown’s,
but finish each day on their garden kneelers,
howling at the black spotted rose and insatiable moss,
desperate for a half pint of herbicide or a pesticide pill.
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Glen Hunting: Future Blues
after W.H. Auden
Stop all the clocks. Cut off the internet.
Prevent the trolls from mocking every global threat.
Turn down the synth-pop and with forthright feet
Gather here in earnest—in the park, in the street.
Let drones shape the words of the protest we give,
Scribbling on the sky the question, “Can we live?”
Forewarn all the children, our heavy-laden kin.
Brace for where we’re going; mourn for where we’ve been.
This is our North, our South, our East and West,
Our playpen of the Ego, and to Hell with the rest.
All peoples and environments are brutalised and sore
From the crimes that we commit, yet insist that we abhor.
The stars will not help us; they’re too far to reach.
We’re earthbound by mania and the love we can’t teach.
So many re-awakenings survival must compel
As we struggle beyond hopelessness for new ways to dwell.
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Jacob Mckibbin: Ars Poetica
I started writing poetry in school
because I was failing in every subject
and thought that poetry could not be failed.
None of the teachers who called me dyslexic
knew how hard it is to do homework
in a home that’s broken. I would start
writing as soon as I got in from school.
Not stop until I heard my dad’s workvan door
slam shut in the driveway. My dad
was so unliterary that even his workvan
had no writing on the side of it.
Once a week I went to speech therapy.
There are still words from my childhood
that I do not know how to say. The only poetry
in that house was in my GCSE English anthology.
The first poem was Edward Kamau Braitwaite’s Limbo.
I might have been the only one in my class
that read the poem outside the classroom.
The only one in my class who still remembers the lines
long dark night is the silence in front of me/
and the music is saving me
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Jill Sharp: Miss Tromans hopes
as she steps up to receive her bouquet
after decades of graft at the chalk face,
the whiteboard, the interactive screen,
that she’ll have inspired a love of poetry,
drama or fiction in a few of her pupils;
but a lifetime of teaching has made
of this dreamer a realist.
She knows that for every child
in whom she has nurtured a passion,
there’ll be hundreds by whom she’s
entirely forgotten, and with luck only one
who quickly turns off every dramatized
Dickens, who remembers her ground-breaking
lessons and curses her name.
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Baraa Alassi: Acton library work experience poem
Imagine you can consider all ideas
And images represented by all words
And numbers in all libraries worldwide.
Open the book of this consideration.
Touch the paper. See the illustration
Of you, reading, when you were ten
In your local library. Turn
Several pages. Now read how you
And that other person ignited romance
In, of all places, the stacks, third floor,
In quite a different library.
Librarians know where wisdom’s stored.
They catalogue the countless forms
Of silence and tell people what they
Didn’t know they wanted to know.
They treat the mentally fractured
As if they’re whole, the dull as if they’re
Sharp, Winter as if it’s Summer.
All libraries may now gather inside invisible
Electrons. After closing time, books in Sweden
Send emails to maps in Chile. A librarian in Topeka
Posts a reply to one in Tokyo, adding to a blue thread
Wrapped around the globe.
As sincerely as librarians worry for books, for shelves,
For catalogues, buildings, and best practices,
So should we worry for librarians, for images and ideas.
At a table in a library, a circle of light Lies on a book.
The hand not writing turns
The page, and something important happens.
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Rustin Larson: I Created
a little one room school in my room.
I am its one teacher and its one student,
a concerto of violins and clarinets.
I read my old poems. I miss people
who have died, even though I never
interacted with them face to face,
like Walther Von Der Vogelweide
the German minnesinger and his mentor
Reinmar, how I miss them and their cold
springs and summers holding snow
in the mountains. I miss my shirt
made from goat's hide, the dirty golden
curls, the casks of brandy cured
by literate monks, and the woodcrafter's
carvings of grapes on the oaken lids
of casks. I am allowed, in my school,
if I so choose, to sing to the banner
of my invented country, Hypnosia,
and its benevolent and eternally sleeping
king, Wagner the First and only,
and his royal tapestries depicting royal
unicorns dancing in pairs with a pregnant
queen dressed in blue velvet
trimmed with snowy flowers.
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John Grey: No Delivery
I’ve been waiting forty years
for that package.
When I’m not staring out the window,
I’m sitting on the stoop.
Where the hell is that chocolate brown UPS truck?
It’s been so long since I ordered it.
So long, in fact, I don’t even remember what it is.
I wonder what’s keeping them,
They tell me over and over
that it’s on its way.
But so is Judgement Day.
And I’m not holding my sinful breath for that.
Maybe someone took it
from our doorstep.
Or out of the back of the truck.
But how can I report it stolen
when I don’t know what it is?
I’m haunted by this terrible thought.
What if it never arrives?
What if there never was a parcel to begin with?
What if my address doesn’t exist?
What if there’s no such person as me?
If only it would get here.
My life needs something to go on with.
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John Bartlett: intertidal
now that I am older
than my father now that
time has twisted years
so out of shape would he
become my younger brother/ friend
and we just two old men
discussing our intertidal business
I’d explain the Internet Facebook,
zoom the ways we now connect
and that spam now means something new
but most of all I’d want to ask about
those times – when first he saw
my mother who was first
to smile or speak and what words were
said what he felt on holding me a baby
ask him to colour moments still
just black and white those Kodak smiles
now that I am older
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Phil Kirby: In the Garden
Again I am beside the casement
of my upstairs room, looking out
on the garden where my mother bends
among the beds, tending marigolds
or pruning roses. When she stands,
against the backdrop of our lawn,
her hair is the colour of fresh rust,
a vixen-red she claims as explanation
for her temper. My father steps out
from the shed, joiner’s tools in hand,
exchanges unheard words with both
my older brothers, who lounge –
the way they do – in faded deckchairs.
When everybody laughs, the youngest,
playing with toy soldiers in the earth,
looks up from his different world
and wonders what the joke could be.
Then, one by one, as if on cue,
they turn their smiles to me and
seem to ask if I am coming down
before the warmth of afternoon is lost.
For a moment I am caught: between
the choice of saying ‘yes’ or staying
where I am. And that pause brings
a question, at once so easy and so hard
to answer: how it is I’ve come to be
the only one on this side of the glass?
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Jack Heslop: Had They Been Loved
The porous human dignities
bewail boys and girls who never bathed
in waterfalls when they were young
and just as pocked with pores.
Love does not always heal the flesh.
It grows it when, applied to babes,
it makes them just about ready
to brave the endless woods.
And so we sometimes glimpse,
or if unlucky feel, the warped
and shrivelled heart cry out
in acts of cruelty, some small,
some large. And wonder if
a mother’s breasts might just
have soothed the tender beast
now bent on making all men sore.
A father’s hands have held the bull
before it reached the china shop.
Had they been loved, had we been saved.
Had parts of these woods not been razed.
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Colin Ian Jeffery: Billy
Never speaks
Trapped within damaged brain
Body twisted, limbs trembling
Sitting in hospital yard
Humming tunes without melody.
Bright soul standing tall
Articulate mind intact
Singing melodious songs of love
Only God and he can hear.
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Stuart Pickford: Been There, Done That
No, I never caught bullets,
strutted up to a crook point-blank
and tied the barrel of his shotgun
into a knot or placed my palm
on the engine of a runaway train
seconds before it plunged into an abyss,
all the nuns praying in unison.
But I placed my bare hands
on the roundabout to save you
from that oozy blurriness,
caught you before you hit the gravel
with a breath-holding attack,
steered us through white water
as you trailed your hand in the river.
Years later, you bought me the T-shirt,
extra-large, electric blue;
the yellow triangle on the chest
like an energy shield, Superman
emblazoned in red and you
slipped me back into the ordinary,
a dad with a novelty gift.
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Michael O’Brien: You Won’t Remember This
You’ll have so many memories.
You won’t remember this.
But, for me, for me, this is bliss.
These memories will stay with me.
They’ll be gone from you.
Hiding in the closet, from the monster.
Wading hand in hand into the surf.
Running and screaming from the tiny tsunami.
On the ground, playing, where all the toys come to life.
Piggyback rides and then up onto the shoulders.
First time on a swing.
And you say, Daddy don’t let me go.
I’m older now.
I have no memories of when I was 4 years old.
Those were cogs in the cognitive gears that spin my being.
But they wore out.
You’ll have so many memories.
You won’t remember this.
But for me, for me, this is bliss.
These memories will stay –
though gone from you
they'll transfer gently into me.
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Caleb Murdock: Didi
I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, though you know
how much I tried (those visits on the weekends).
Who was this girl from the family’s other side?
I was too far from your age to understand you.
My teenage years had been a blur. Not sure
how to be a brother or a friend, I couldn’t
give you the sense of family you deserved.
But we shared the same dad, and I knew how skilful
an invader he could be, an obfuscator.
He could pull a child out of her skin and make
her question who she was, turn her childish joy
to scrambled eggs. By then, the harm was done.
Your mother was the same: two determined
narcissists, rapists by another name.
You couldn’t live in a world that didn’t
love you, disillusioned you. I knew how,
but couldn’t find the right words to convey.
The truth is that the world loves very few;
I sought to show you that along the way.
You tried to fly and discovered that you couldn’t.
Your broken frame looked awkward in the box;
eyes closed, too late to show you how to live;
ears closed, too late to say it won’t take long,
too late to tell you “this will pass” “be strong”.
You never grew up; I grew up too late to save you.
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Lesley Burt: First summer-dress day of the year
All winter the child made charcoal drawings of nests
knotted to bare branches until bracken
uncoiled from moss like heads of small green snakes.
The thrush sang its full repertoire from a sycamore
and the blackbird from a chimney. Rooks cackled at bedtime
and called her early for breakfast.
On the morning of painted eggs and Easter chocolate
she wore the cotton dress sprinkled with poppies and harebells
marked by a ridge from mother’s letting-down of last year’s hem –
followed neighbours who gathered underneath an old oak
looking up to the colony of scruffy nests. One rook
was thrashing its wings against the trunk, its head trapped in the bark.
A big lad started to climb. People watched, clenched in a hush.
The child clutched the fabric of her dress tight in her fist
breathless as if the bird’s panic was her own.
The boy clung, stretched, touched with fingertips. Couldn’t free it
had to wring its neck, scrambled down, pale and silent.
The child wept, made drawings of motherless eggs.
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Denise Bundred: The Harvest Being Reaped
Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper,1889.
Museum Folkwang Essen Germany
"I think it will be one that you’ll place in your home"
Vincent to Theo van Gogh, September 1889
I
Through the iron-barred window you watch the figure
in a straw-hat struggle in the day’s sullen heat.
Alone in the walled plot, he marks the year’s turn
in every sweep of sickle, swing of scythe.
Light-drenched — some sheaves standing, others toppled
as the sun strengthens above a line of violet hills.
You paint with pent-up fury like a man possessed
but slowly, from dawn until late without respite.
The task at an end, you write to your brother —
‘The reaper is complete. Quite the opposite of that Sower
The image of death is in it but there is nothing sad here —
broad daylight floods everything with a wash of fine gold.’
II
Theo’s wife unpacks a crate of paintings in their apartment —
six months married, pregnant and worried
about your brother’s pallor, his shivering and cough.
Olive Trees breathe rosemary and dusty earth into
the damp room. Cypresses reach for summer clouds.
Starry Night — a faint threatens to engulf her until
The Reaper embraces the radiance of gaslight.
Compassion she can scarcely comprehend rises
like Hokusai’s wave from the deep ocean.
Denise Bundred: Imagine a Still Life — Auberge Ravoux, 31st July 1890
Vincent van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)
If you had painted this, the floor might tilt as in the Night Café.
It would hang in the Musée d'Orsay or lie in a vault for decades.
Palette knives, crushed tubes of oils, brushes, rags and turps
(greenish grey in a jam-jar) clutter the paint-stained table.
Canvases blaze from every wall. Your wooden bed— angled
to the right in the foreground — mattress bare, pillow stained.
Yet even you could never show the heat that beats through roof
tiles, the trace of lavender left by Émile Bernard’s handkerchief
rice and cabbage from the kitchen or carbolic that Adeline used
on the boards yesterday, before your friends gathered.
You would need yellow ochre for petals spilled in the corner
beside the white cloth which cover your coffin.
Your brother pale and thin, is reflected in the mirror on the far
wall with his wife Johanna — a presence at his side but apart.
The shadow of their argument with you three weeks ago
is almost too large for a single frame to hold.
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Briege Duffaud: Watching Sky Arts
He didn’t pass away, you fool,
he shot himself, died in despair
cursing jagged crows in garish cornfields,
craving the solace of cherry trees in Spring,
the ordered beauty of raked sand.
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Paul Stephenson: Interrogative
‘And so how did he die?’ they say,
‘…if you don’t mind me asking.’
‘Well, the…’ he hesitates, surprised,
confused by the motive to the question.
‘I don’t mean to be nosey,’ they assure,
smiling politely and stepping back.
‘Erm, all I…’ he utters, ‘…it’s just that,’
unsure if he really knows for certain.
‘I was just wondering if…’ they continue,
saying ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to pry…’
‘Ignore me,’ they say, ‘engage brain
before opening mouth, and all that…’
‘No, it’s fine,’ he insists, ‘really, it’s fine,
…it’s a perfectly reasonable question.’
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David Parsley: A Rumored Demise
"Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him --- you and I…
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled
to death under our knives”
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
I too expected more: a denunciation to grab the navel
with its black hook, spook sparrows from my ficus
fomenting a movement to stoke or darken
something, the sun maybe or at least the planetarium doors.
This notice with its tired ironies refreshing prior guidelines:
check grips in advance for stains; the coot with the lantern
will not be coming, repeat, not coming.
The curious decide to attend. It's more than odd,
casket gaping its recently swabbed mouth, distended lips
reflecting cloud cover suspended above the open dig.
No obvious wounds show. They handle that kind of thing.
Some leave immediately, one woman supported on either side.
“My sister told me not to come! It doesn't even look like him!”
Tallish people in lab coats busy themselves with needles
nodding in satisfaction, grant brief statements.
The pluck-bearded man wearing a tool belt appears
shouldering a heft of long and short beams, nails,
strides quickly through. He pauses to glance down
the chopped edges of silence, around those present
catching my gaze. Consider what the dead do.
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Konstandinos Mahoney: Nordic Nightmare
Knees playing up, he files through showrooms -
bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms,
along with newlyweds, couples pushing prams.
He wonders if they might do coffins – Billy
Resting Units. He slumps into a Poang armchair,
inhales the trippy scent of compressed pine.
Head screwed on backwards, lopsided grin,
he sinks into an underworld of skew-whiff chairs,
wonky kitchen units, botched bookcases.
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Benjamin Rosser: Butcher Block
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Ian is dead, a butcher by trade, beef brisket rump and flank, top sirloin rib and shank, these primal cuts he often made. Ian is gone, idle tools still gleam, breaking knife meat grinder, boning knife meat slicer, sharp hooks and saws a polished team. An artist, his brushes keen blades, sub-primal cuts, sales cuts, cleaving cold flesh from bone and fat from meat, all wrapped and neat. Ian took up what there was to do, training on the job when there was no other job, honing his craft with life’s bills due. Unfinished, frayed grey drawings, yellowed portfolio pushed under his porch, old trikes, trunks, and other weary things. Ian is mourned, meat market shades down, customers forsaken, no British back bacon, funeral morn a solemn grey town. Ian smoked himself to death, animal friend at the end, secret vegan, “my charcoals please” — his sudden, next-to-last breath.
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***
James Norcliffe: Quitting the circus
It’s an old story: the boy runs
away to join the circus preferring
circus sawdust to butchers’ sawdust.
He’ll pass me on his way in
for I’m getting out. I’m sick of it;
I refuse to be a monkey anymore.
Sick of the prancing, dancing
scratching my armpits malarkey.
They put me in the clown car
(last clown out) not on the trapeze
where I might have briefly soared.
Luckily, the anti-cruelty to living
creatures gang put the kibosh
on big cats before they could put
my head in the jaws of a lion.
There was no chance of ever being
one of the stars I could only glimpse
through that tiny rip in the big top.
There’s no advancement here,
I’m getting out while there’s time.
The only good thing about circus
sawdust is that it’s edible at a pinch.
Butchery has more appeal. Or chartered
accountancy. He’ll find out soon enough.
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***
Oleg Semonov: The Night Choir Performance
response to 24/7 air raid sirens in Ukraine.
is announced by a pretty female voice
coming from my phone speaker
while the tired evening is slowly sliding
into the frightened midnight to remind me
that a new day has begun.
The sun has disappeared and left me
only candles, a flashlight
and black shadows moving against the walls
to the singing of multiple voices
waking the sleeping city
through the introduction of soprano.
To intensify the drama, a mezzo-soprano
is brought in to help me brace myself
to face the witch
who can visit me without invitation
at any moment
on her magic broomstick.
Now it’s time for alto, tenor
to add some terror while baritone and bass,
followed by noisy cymbals, drumbeats,
are trying to create
a foretaste of my final night.
And then, with Odysseus in my mind,
I’m switching from this choir of the absurd
by putting on my earpieces
to hold on until the break of dawn
together with Mick’s band and
Just Another Night.
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***
Julian Dobson: Commuterland
The city eddies in a million odysseys
through swirling tarmac, traffic’s orange hum,
all homeward bound, or drifting. It’s a breeze
to live here, some say. The indignities
are minor: pay’s dire, but the cost of homes
holds steady, you don’t need millions. Odysseys
are for heroes. Gridlocked ring-road journeys
drag you down, though. You’re dancing clear of harm –
homeward bound, but idiots drifting with the breeze
get on your nerves. Something jolts. A memory’s
triggered, or a dream: a green woman, leaf-limbed, calm
in the city’s eddies. You’d sail a million odysseys
to find her. A man with a dog jumps out. You freeze,
curse, lean on the horn, brace, remember to slam
the brakes. Homeward bound, you drift. A grey breeze
eases sweat from your face, that acid seizing
your guts. You catch yourself humming a childhood hymn.
The city eddies. Your head’s a million odysseys,
never homeward bound, driven in the breeze.
Julian Dobson: The city repeats itself
We know the net will last only so long,
holding us here in thick woollen comfort,
routinely suspended over an abyss
where humming crowds repeat oblivious tasks.
Holding us here, in thick woollen comfort,
— log on, sip wine, buy condoms or cardigans —
humming crowds repeat oblivious tasks.
The floor smoulders. Our noses twitch in faint smoke.
Log on, sip wine — buying condoms or cardigans
continues. Doctors prescribe regular structure.
The floor smoulders. Our noses twitch in faint smoke.
Life is less uncertain than in other cities.
Continue. Doctors prescribe regular structure,
routines. Suspended over the abyss,
life is less uncertain than in other cities.
We know the net will last only so long.
The final lines are borrowed from Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’.
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***
Vyacheslav Konoval: Volunteer veterans
A battalion is born
from former police officers,
wear a chevron
take the badge and medallion.
Training ahead
blood, sweat, and loss,
shame, I’m in a warm bed.
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Colin Pink: Edged Off
See these threads? All these silent threads,
hanging, just hanging before us, in the air
like an unstrung instrument; no vibrations;
they’ve forgotten even to hum to themselves.
See here the scissors’ mouths gaping wide,
insane laughter frozen between the blades;
such clever precision hiding in plain sight.
Snip, snip, they say, in a voice that’s clipped,
forged with the confidence privilege brings.
Here are the strings, all those humble strings,
no longer playable, no longer biddable, tension
all gone, just hanging, waiting, anticipating.
Snip, snip, here we come, click, clickety-click;
down they fall, all tumble down, lost to sight,
without a cry, no resistance left in their fibres,
cut by those shining blades, whose chill clasp
will be the last, the very last thing they’ll feel.
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***
Alison Jones: Dealers On the Corner
Outside, on the grey ribbon road,
threaded in silence,
bled anaemic of the daytime spectrum,
to monochrome,
engine rasp, pedal to metal,
announces presences,
racing from adverse cambered bends,
to a cold stacked house.
Man-made monster invades
the peace of animal sleep,
like a blood pressure surge
metronoming pulse beats staccato.
Rise out of the cumulous nest,
footpad the carpet, a night time garden,
finger reach to cold, keep out, window clasp.
Opening and leaning through is like
spelling a part of yourself into a fairy tale,
where villains move in cover of night,
that cloaks all savage volatile unknowns.
When you rise with the day,
take the rasp with you in ear’s secret shell,
a reminder that the world is accumulations,
of what we usually see, and the hidden.
Sometimes those somewheres
seep in along the edges of each other,
and secrets of others bleed through,
like bruises ripening whole.
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***
Judith Wozniak: After the Party
There might be enough grant money between us
to share a saveloy from The White Hart,
its tight tan skin bursting with juices.
We torture ourselves with foods we want to eat:
bagels at the all-night kiosk in Brick lane,
crisp potato latkes from Whitechapel market
wrapped in a collar of greaseproof paper,
a twist of pastries from the Kossofs’ stall,
still warm, crusted with cinnamon sugar.
In the debris, twiglet fragments, cheese footballs,
toppled bottles of Hirondelle, Blue Nun,
runnels of wax peeled from a Mateus Rose candle.
There’s no milk in the fridge only forlorn remains:
a curried egg, two soggy vol-au-vents, the grapefruit
hedgehog stripped of its cocktail stick spines.
Behind piles of books, balanced on light fittings,
roosting along picture rails, Gulab Jamun
made by Roy’s mum, discarded after one bite.
All we have is the saffron-yellow comfort
of Mrs Roychoudary’s leftover sweetmeats
and I’m suddenly homesick for a roast dinner
in a warm kitchen, thick Welsh gravy, carrots
from cousin Terry’s allotment. I miss my mother
hovering in her pinny, with a salvo of questions.
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Maëlle Leggiadro: Nothing Good Happens After Midnight
The graceless nights and dazed choices
Are nothing but the greatest source of wisdom
The well-known tales
Of house parties, awkward greetings and skipped dinners
Acne-scared skin and smudged makeup
Boys who behave like men but think of themselves as less
And loud girls in see-through bikini tops
All the fierce passions of the world diluted
In 17 oz cups of rum, red bull and cheap coke
We pretend it to be sensational
When half of the night is looking around the room to find
Your only friend trying so hard to be liked
By the whole damn crowd
My greatest wisdom oozes down
Like buttery sunshine
From those well-known tales
That sink under your skin
Prickling with shame and guilt and fear
This is the key to the severe lesson to learn
In your early twenties –
Nothing good happens after midnight
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Nicola Carter: Freshly Minted
I am punching but you pick me from the line of freshly minted
first years, usually they choose my friend with her tits
and her laugh-aloud looks, like she knows what to do.
A proper date, a burger, and a few beers. I only bring the special ones here
you say (I realise later I should have left much earlier)
but you look so kind and clean, you like my eyes, want to know about me.
Back in your room you seem less keen on listening, the kissing
is okay, a bit rougher than I’d known with the boys at the Sixth Form disco.
But you are so much stronger, wish my skirt were longer.
Perhaps I imagine I keep saying no.
You are asleep by the time I go, weep blood, dribble shame
you never speak to me again. And when I tell my friend;
no one hears a thing
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Elizabeth Smither: The Amando Caruso handkerchief
All day I carry my Amando Caruso handkerchief
around with me. It is larger than a normal handkerchief
43cm x 43cm. I don’t usually use handkerchiefs
tissues plucked from a box like feathers
and strewn like feathers. This handkerchief
is a companion. I think of Desdemona, betrayed
by dropping hers, Iago picking it up.
How she must have missed it, longed to hold it,
wring it through her fingers as she spoke her excuse.
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Chrissie Gittins: Garments
The Swiss cheese plant’s aerial roots
butted the morning room wall.
Along the dark passage
an inevitable passion surfaced.
We sank to our knees,
edged thin cotton garments aside.
Skin sliding against skin,
saliva escaped from the corner of our mouths.
The back door opened – my parents
returned early from an afternoon drive.
Not quick enough to rearrange ourselves
we were discovered.
You were asked to leave, and when you later called
told that I was ‘indisposed’.
Guilt squeezed through the holes
of a misshapen rusty sieve.
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Julie Gardner: Falling
Eve picks the plums and figs then rests
against the apple tree, the tree
whose fruit they’d left to ripen, fall and rot.
He’d said he’d come and help her, yet
another easy promise he’ll deny, he’ll shrug
and say God knows he’s got important
things to think about, God needs to see
him honour and obey. Time was when she
would stand beside them, try to speak
of what she knew, patterns she had seen
and wondered at, a sense of something
not yet understood, a yearning for a life
less safe, less sure, but every time
they’d shrugged, allowed her words
to hover for a while, then turned
to what they knew.
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Anthony Dolphin: Eden Had Two Apple Trees
Eden had two apple trees
Twenty-four feet apart
Or four fathers laid end to end.
In August, wasps drunk on fruit ferment
Devoured the flesh and left the skin.
Boughs too low to duck under,
The mower with a will of its own
Drew Dad to branches cursing.
In drizzle, willowbrella, a weeping bell.
As the rain made mud,
We made tracks and tunnels and towns.
Perfume from petals for Mum
That always turned to mint
And we stayed out as long as we could
Until it was time to come in.
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***
.Bethany W Pope: Spanish Moss
Odd what images resurface
over the course of a day:
blinking against the tissue of your macula
like an internet ad on your grandparents'
unprotected browser.
Today I saw, vivid as ever,
the ancient man who sat on a bench
at G.T. Bray Park, in Bradenton, Florida.
He was so old that his ankles
resembled melted candles,
wax left to deform on the dashboard
of a purple PT Cruiser.
He wore a green tweed suit,
with shiny leather patches on the elbows,
and a shapeless brown hat
with a crease in the place
that might once have been a brim.
Anyway, he'd sit there, under the vast
sprawl of an oak, feeding a squirrel
out of a paper bag of peanuts.
The paper bag was striped, red and white,
and almost translucent with decades of oil.
The squirrel was ancient as well—
his tail nearly naked, gray fur patched—
and they'd do the same trick again and again,
with all the delight and unthinkable sorrow
of a wind-up toy that you'd find
buried in the back of an antique shop.
When I was eight or nine, I saved up
for a month, to buy a mouse that you'd power
by turning a key in its back. The mouse was
covered with fur taken from a rabbit
that died sixty years before I was born.
It would spin around the floor, whipping
its black rubber tail about like the defunct
propeller of a boat. Anyway, I'd watch
that old man directing his squirrel
from one arm to the other. I'd note the way
the Spanish moss cast shadows on the ground
like witch hair. It's the image I get
when I think about death.
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Lynne Hjelmgaard: That Summer In Maine
There was the dramatic ferry voyage over
to the island, the shelter of my father’s shoulder
against a brisk wind and sea; the enjoyable way
he bit into his apple, an extra large bite.
Never seen anyone’s head touch a ceiling
until the young doctor arrived.
Lying in bed with fever I was apprehensive
but curious. His tall, kind presence filled the room.
Don’t step on anthills! I was running away
from a goat who was sniffing in the woods.
Ants were crawling up my legs. It was a dream
standing still, invading ants consumed me,
the goats my enemy. I was the centre of the world’s
discomforts. My sister came to the rescue, but not without
laughter and tears. It all happened: my mother
caught in a thunderstorm, sunlight breaking
through the pines, the long shadows in the cabin
waiting for her return, my intense fear for her demise.
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Robert Etty: Mantle
Verb (intransitive), used by old people
when people who are now old were young
to indicate a manner of walking
below the walker’s average speed,
without intention or urgency,
not necessarily from A
to B, and allowing for halts
and reversals.
Picture a cat on a clovery lawn
in a one o’clock sun’s line of fire,
apparently undecided whether
flopping down here would suit its non-
purpose more exactly than trekking
as far as a shady bush. ‘Yon cat’s
mantlin’, sither,’ the old would say,
as a hot-furred cat, in two minds at least,
mantled halfway to a purple lilac
and turned, licked a paw, and mantled back.
Or a great-uncle, as they were then,
who worked until he was sixty-nine,
adored the same great-aunt for better and worse,
and mantled on empty afternoons
to the wood-stained bench at the top of the road
to watch the purposeful passing cars,
but sometimes turned back halfway.
Those days, those great-aunts and -uncles and cats
eventually mantled into the past
and, after they’d settled in, they changed.
And mantling isn’t the verb any more,
but now and then a cat in clover, observed
or not, will reconsider, lick a front paw
and mantle over this way.
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Phil Connolly: Before You Replaced My Hips
You raised their X-rays on your screen
and read me the proofs in negative.
First, my right dysplastic relic’s transmutation
from the glossy ball and socket I was born with,
to this sick, decrepit brace of rodents, locking
snouts and mithering in shade below my belt.
Out of synch to tune of an inch and a half
beneath the hips, my legs mismatch.
To take the dis-harmonics of imbalance
from the top: my short-leg shoulder heaves
and drops. My spine’s a snake
that twists and bites my lower back.
If standing on the spot’s a migraine
in my pelvic skull, then every other
step’s another botched extraction
of the same, demented tooth.
Meanwhile, osteo-arthritically catching up,
the left hip’s leaking lubricant so fast
degeneration beckons like the winning post –
right hip versus left – a two-horse only race
which neither cares to win; and runner-up
and second place both finish last.
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Karen Jane Cannon: How to shore up a cliff
A day of too many gnawing anxieties.
Outside is ochre and terracotta
sunlight bouncing against striped bands
of cliff face, pitted
by many gales
Each colour is a memory of millennia
stability amongst flux
now
slowly collapsing
I stare up
at a blue crescent of slippage
I wonder if anyone else sees this catastrophe
To shore up a cliff
you need deep roots —
shrubs of holm oaks, ivy, tree lupin
with racemes of fragrant yellow
you’ll need great groynes of rock —
sandstone like bastions of seals
for the tide to break against
if all else fails
concrete walls curved stoutly
to take the sheer weight
of stress
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Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana: When I photograph nine oyster catchers
at North Berwick
I fail to capture how they’re almost falling
over each other at the water’s edge,
heads tilted towards Bass Rock, in the distance.
And there’s no evidence in my photo of their jizz,
that funny little scurry along the beach.
And in the pic I took of you, Glenn,
on your birthday, it’s impossible to see the puckering
of your lips, as you ask: am I a blenny, or a goby fish?
Or hear us debate whether Bass Rock
is white because of the gannets’ wings, or their shit.
And although coffee-coloured sunspots
show your age, laugh lines don’t betray
the arguments that day. The fact that we couldn’t
relax. Never did get to the Auld Hoose
for a birthday pint. I remember our conversation
about another beach and another photo,
of you, aged two, at Margate, striking
a silly pose beside Mickey Mouse.
The photo doesn’t show how you wore-out
the photographer with the Disney cut-out.
Followed him, asking questions.
And it doesn’t show
that this distraction, this infinite capacity
for questioning, is your thing.
If you were a bird, we’d call it your jizz.
Your favourite poet calls it inscape:
your peculiarities, your you-ness. The stuff we can’t translate.
Jizz: the sum total of all the characteristics that make a bird species unique.
(birding-world.com)
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Maggie Freeman: Ice-fishing on Ganymede
Forget the journey
the crashed craft
the fact you can’t get back.
You are here, that’s what counts.
Open the door to the yellow sunrise.
Step out on the ice surface.
You won’t slip.
Gritty debris shed over millennia
makes your footing secure.
Shipwreck’s behind you.
Rescue from it what you can.
In your silver suit and ice boots
drag your sled stacked high
with thermal drill and coiled line
across the bare arc of this moon.
How tiny you seem, like a fly
trapped in an arid museum
but you have hands apt
to assemble your thermal drill,
a mind free to remember
this moon’s composition -
how the globe of its ocean
is a water container
vaster than all the old oceans of Earth.
It’s crusted with thirty-four kilometres of ice.
Take your time with that drill.
You’ll get through in due course.
Now drop in your line.
It’s very long and micro-fine.
Sit there, wait and consider
what you may catch, what may live
in that great ocean, seaweed, and plankton
fused together into remarkable life.
.
Ganymede is one of the moons of Jupiter.
A mission has recently set off to search for signs of life there.
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Jean Atkin: Hekla
still miles from the crater
we lose the tarmac
for two hours we are condemned
to drive on washboard pumice
we see how Hekla is an upturned boat
her cratered keel an offering to north
my pencil skates on the jerking page
of my notebook, I think how
Hekla’s centuries rained volcanic ash,
smothered grass outright, sent sheep
bolting in terror, snagged farms in torrents
of lava, shifted whole hillsides in terrible noise
how fish boiled in the rivers and
the mountain’s ice was wholly melted
how at times the people observed birds
both large and small, they said
flying in the mountain’s fire
and took them to be souls
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Baraa Alassi lives in London and is studying business at Uxbridge college. This is his first published poem.
Jean Atkin’s latest publications are Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press) and The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (Indigo Dreams). Her third full collection High Nowhere is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams. Recent work in Pennine Platform, Raceme, Anthropocene, Finished Creatures, One Hand Clapping and Acumen. She works as a poet in education and community.
John Bartlett is the author of eight books-fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize. He reviews and podcasts at beyondtheestuary.com and lives on the southern coast of Australia
Denise Bundred was a consultant paediatric cardiologist and began writing poetry in retirement. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and has an MA in Writing.. She won the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2016, coming second in 2019. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies and poetry magazines and her pamphlet, Litany of a Cardiologist, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020.
Lesley Burt’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and online. She is a member of the Tears in the Fence Workshop and Festival groups. Her pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, will appear in 2023, published by Templar Poetry.
Karen Jane Cannon is a Creative PhD Candidate at the University of Southampton, researching poetry and place. The Salterns, her third poetry pamphlet, is due to be published in 2024 by Nine Pens Press. She was the winner of The Hamish Canham Prize 2022, commended for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2021, shortlisted for The Bridport Prize in 2019, and a finalist in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2017.
Nicola Carter is a new poet, having worked for more than 40 years as an NHS doctor, mainly in the areas of Community Sexual Health and Inner City General Practice. Patients’ stories as well as personal and professional experiences are currently the main focus of her writing.
Phil Connolly is married and lives near York. He taught for many years in North Africa and the Middle East. He was shortlisted in the Wordsworth Trust Competition and has been published in several anthologies and magazines including Dream Catcher, The High Window, London Grip, The Moth, The North and Pennine Platform.
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana‘s debut collection Sing me down from the dark was published by SALT in 2022. Her work is published widely, most recently in PN Review, The Moth, Tears in the Fence and Fenland Poetry Journal. Her website is: alexandracorrintachibana.com
Julian Dobson has had work published in a variety of print and online journals, including Shearsman, Orbis, Pennine Platform and Ink, Sweat & Tears. He is a previous winner of the Guernsey international poetry competition, and lives in Sheffield.
Anthony Dolphin (born Tittensor, 1968) stopped working in his daylight job (in language education and teacher training) in 2020 but continues to work making music (with the band Santa Sprees) and art when energy permits. He has never submitted poetry anywhere before and is presently daunted by the vast supply-side surfeit of content and mildly ashamed to have arrived at a crowded station called what-the-hell-do-I-do-with-all-this-unsolicited-stuff-I-have-written.
Briege Duffaud is an Irish writer of fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in various publications including The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, French Literary Review, Acumen, Orbis, Frogmore Papers …She has also published two novels and a story collection. She lives in London.
Robert Etty lives in Lincolnshire. His most recent collection, Planes Flying Over, was published in 2020 by Shoestring Press.
Maggie Freeman has had poems published in magazines including The North, Poetry Wales, Acumen and others. Her three historical novels are available with Lume Books. Her long procrastinated-over novel The Wives of Canute is published in early summer.
Julie Gardner is currently a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. She is writing a critical / creative thesis on how fear and hope is revealed in women’s poetry. She taught in primary schools for over forty years.
Chrissie Gittins’ poetry collections are Armature (Arc), I’ll Dress One Night As You (Salt) and Sharp Hills (Indigo Dreams). She appeared on BBC Countryfile with her fifth children’s collection, Adder Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books). She has received Arts Council and Author’s Foundation awards and features on the Poetry Archive. Her recent poems are published in Perverse, The Blue Nib, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, High Window, Acumen and in the anthologies Women On Nature (Unbound), Wonder (Natural History Museum/Macmillan), A Poet for Every Day of The Year (Macmillan), Empty Nest (Picador), and Night Feeds and Morning Songs (Trapeze)
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. New work is upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
Jack Heslop is an English literature graduate from Essex. He lives and work in Colchester, and has been reading and writing poetry for pleasure since he was 15.
Lynne Hjelmgaard has published four collections of poetry. Her 5th collection, The Turpentine Tree, will be published with Seren in Oct. 2023
Glen Hunting is a writer living in Alice Springs, Central Australia. His poetry has been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Meniscus, Burrow, Portside Review, and elsewhere
Colin Ian Jeffery is a modernist poet, a movement with development of imagism stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and has a strong reaction against war, tyranny, and oppression of truth and innocence, but unlike other poets in the modernism movement like Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound he has a profound faith in God.
Alison Jones’ work has been widely published in journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Proletarian Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets, Heartwood (2018) and Omega (2020) were published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a full collection.
Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead, 2009) and The Third History (Lapwing, 2018). Poems have appeared more recently in Poetry Ireland, Stand, The High Window and others. He is Treasurer of the Fire River Poets group in Taunton
Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet whose work is devoted to the most pressing social problems of our time, such as poverty, ecology, relations between the people and the government, and war. His poems have appeared in many magazines and translated into Spanish, French, Scottish, and Polish
Rustin Larson‘s writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). Recent poems have appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, London Grip, Poetry East, The Lake, Poetryspace, Pirene’s Fountain, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His chapbook The Cottage on the Hill was published by Cyberwit.net in April of 2022. He is on faculty in Maharishi International University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
Maëlle Leggiadro is a French writer, filmmaker and actress. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Directing. She’s a multi-awarded director and she’s published online by The Hysteria Collective and Empoword Journalism. (This work is protected by the SACD services)
Konstandinos Mahoney has two prizewinning collections of poetry – Tutti Frutti, Sentinel Press (2019) and The Great Comet of 1996 Foretells, Live Cannon (2022), both reviewed in London Grip.
Jacob Mckibbin is a poet from Oxford. He has recently had work in Oxford Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears.
Caleb Murdock is a 72-year-old American who worked as a word-processing operator for most of his life. He had writer’s block until he was about 67, when approaching mortality fixed that problem. Having tripled his output in just five years he is now seeking publication late in life
New Zealand poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play (Proverse), 2013, Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP) 2016 & Deadpan (Otago UP) 2019. His latest collection Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press) was published in 2023. He was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2022.
Michael O’Brien is a poet and playwright. He lives in Chesterfield, New Jersey with his wife Marie and his daughter Penelope. He has BA in political science from Richard Stockton University and a Masters of Teaching degree from The College of New Jersey. He currently teaches young adults on the Autistic Spectrum and writes in his spare time.
David W. Parsley is an engineer/manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he works during the day (okay, and some nights and weekends) on interplanetary probes and rovers. In addition to previous appearance in London Grip, his poems appear in Footnote (forthcoming), Amethyst, Tiny Seed, Autumn Sky Poetry, and other journals and anthologies.
Stuart Pickford is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award. His first collection, The Basics, was published by Redbeck Press and shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection prize. His second collection, Swimming with Jellyfish was published by smith/doorstop. Stuart lives in Harrogate and taught in a local comprehensive school
Colin Pink’s poems have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines. He has published four collections: Acrobats of Sound, (Poetry Salzburg Press, 2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament, (Against the Grain, 2019), Typicity, (Vole, 2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (Paekakariki Press, 2021). He posts a six line poem every day on Instagram @colinpinkpoet
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press), Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose (BrickHouse Books), and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press).
Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Bethany’s most recent books include, Silage (poetry, Indigo Dreams), Masque (novel, Seren), and The Hungry And The Lost (novel, Parthian). Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described Bethany’s latest book as ‘poetry as salvation’…..’This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.’ Bethany currently lives and works in China.
Benjamin WC Rosser is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan where his areas of research and teaching were, respectively, cell biology and human anatomy. His poetry has been published in Consilience Journal and London Grip. He currently resides retired in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife Corinne and children Isabel and Oliver
Carla Scarano D’Antonio obtained her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and has published work in various magazines. Her first short collection was Negotiating Caponata (Dempsey & Windle 2020). She completed her PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading in 2021. Her second collection is Workwear (The High Window 2022). She and Keith Lander won the first prize of the Dryden Translation Competition 2016 with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems
Oleg Semonov currently resides and works as a freelance translator in the city of Dnipro (Ukraine). His work has appeared in Electric Acorn, Eclectica, Poetic Diversity, London Grip and elsewhere
Jill Sharp’s poems have appeared most recently in The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review,and PERVERSE and are forthcoming in Stand. Her pamphlet, Ye gods, was published by Indigo Dreams, and her work featured in Vindication, a 6-poet anthology from Arachne Press. She was runner-up in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize.
Elizabeth Smither’s latest collection of poems, My American Chair was published by Auckland University Press in 2022. The Amando Caruso handkerchief is larger than a normal fine cotton Italian designer handkerchief
Paul Stephenson has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance) and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press). He co-edited Magma issue 70 on ‘Europe’. He co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh and lives between Cambridge and Brussels. He interviews poets at paulstep.com. Instagram: paulstep456 / Twitter: @stephenson_pj
James Thellusson has written for The Oldie, The Nightwatchman and other magazines. His anthology of the bad school reports of the rich and famous – School’s Out, truants, troublemakers and teachers’ pets – was published last November
Judith Wozniak has an MA in Writing Poetry. Her poems have appeared in London Grip, The Alchemy Spoon, South, Sideways, The Frogmore Papers and These are the Hands NHS Anthology. She won first prize in the Hippocrates Competition, 2020. Her pamphlet, Patient Watching, was published by Hedgehog Press in January 2022.
May 29 2023
London Grip New Poetry – Summer 2023
*
The Summer 2023 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:
* Carla Scarano D’Antonio * Ken Pobo * James Thellusson * Glen Hunting
* Jacob Mckibbin * Jill Sharp * Baraa Alassi * Rustin Larson
* John Grey * John Bartlett * Phil Kirby * Jack Heslop
* Colin Ian Jeffery * Stuart Pickford * Michael O’Brien * Caleb Murdock
* Lesley Burt * Denise Bundred * Briege Duffaud * Paul Stephenson
*David Parsley * Konstandinos Mahoney * Benjamin Rosser * James Norcliffe
* Oleg Semonov * Julian Dobson * Vyacheslav Konoval * Colin Pink
* Alison Jones * Judith Wozniak * Maëlle Leggiadro * Nicola Carter
* Elizabeth Smither * Chrissie Gittins * Julie Gardner * Anthony Dolphin
* Bethany W Pope * Lynne Hjelmgaard * Robert Etty * Phil Connolly
* Karen Jane Cannon * Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana * Maggie Freeman * Jean Atkin
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors.
Biographical notes on contributors can be found here
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
A printer-friendly form of this issue can be found at LGNP Summer 2023
SUBMISSIONS: please send up to THREE poems to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Submission windows are: December-January, March-April, June-July
& September-October
Editor’s notes
Carla was a particularly loyal and enthusiastic contributor to London Grip. She was a regular reviewer of poetry collections and art exhibitions; and sometimes she also wrote interesting articles about her travels. Her poems have appeared frequently in our new poetry postings. Fortunately she had submitted a new batch of work shortly before her death and we open this issue with two of her poems and can enjoy her distinctive voice once more.
*
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have recently been reflecting on the inadvisability of taking continuity for granted. This is our 48th posting of new poetry; and while it is highly probable that number 49 will follow in due course I am well aware it’s not inevitable! London Grip depends on the creative efforts of our contributors and the time-management skills of our volunteer staff – not to mention maintaining the computing infrastructure that makes publication possible. We can be grateful that these essential elements have all played their part so well for so long.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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or Macbeth-like disputes with the committee of the allotment, who were expelled from the Royal Horticultural Society for crazy paving patios, dangling baskets of dead succulents in bay windows to spite their neighbours, who cowered unshaven in conservatories in quilted gilets, burning pensions(but never mowed in May), who got busted for their grey hair returning through Heathrow with a belt of weed from Wisley, who knitted hemp and drank nettle wine behind living hedge rows,for purgatoried themselves, night after night, with schemes for rewilding, weaving pergolas from ethereal hawthornstoned on the gypsum of their consciences, who blossomed into a wild meadow of horticultural activists passing out incomprehensible leaflets about Dutch hydroponicsand cried whenever they passed a bed of Chrysanthemums or a compost heap and pilgrimaged regularly to Kew, who study The Carefree Gardener anxious to develop capabilities like Brown’s, but finish each day on their garden kneelers, howling at the black spotted rose and insatiable moss, desperate for a half pint of herbicide or a pesticide pill.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Jacob Mckibbin: Ars Poetica I started writing poetry in school because I was failing in every subject and thought that poetry could not be failed. None of the teachers who called me dyslexic knew how hard it is to do homework in a home that’s broken. I would start writing as soon as I got in from school. Not stop until I heard my dad’s workvan door slam shut in the driveway. My dad was so unliterary that even his workvan had no writing on the side of it. Once a week I went to speech therapy. There are still words from my childhood that I do not know how to say. The only poetry in that house was in my GCSE English anthology. The first poem was Edward Kamau Braitwaite’s Limbo. I might have been the only one in my class that read the poem outside the classroom. The only one in my class who still remembers the lines long dark night is the silence in front of me/ and the music is saving meBack to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Vincent to Theo van Gogh, September 1889
I
Through the iron-barred window you watch the figure
in a straw-hat struggle in the day’s sullen heat.
Alone in the walled plot, he marks the year’s turn
in every sweep of sickle, swing of scythe.
Light-drenched — some sheaves standing, others toppled
as the sun strengthens above a line of violet hills.
You paint with pent-up fury like a man possessed
but slowly, from dawn until late without respite.
The task at an end, you write to your brother —
‘The reaper is complete. Quite the opposite of that Sower
The image of death is in it but there is nothing sad here —
broad daylight floods everything with a wash of fine gold.’
II
Theo’s wife unpacks a crate of paintings in their apartment —
six months married, pregnant and worried
about your brother’s pallor, his shivering and cough.
Olive Trees breathe rosemary and dusty earth into
the damp room. Cypresses reach for summer clouds.
Starry Night — a faint threatens to engulf her until
The Reaper embraces the radiance of gaslight.
Compassion she can scarcely comprehend rises
like Hokusai’s wave from the deep ocean.
Denise Bundred: Imagine a Still Life — Auberge Ravoux, 31st July 1890
Vincent van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)
If you had painted this, the floor might tilt as in the Night Café.
It would hang in the Musée d'Orsay or lie in a vault for decades.
Palette knives, crushed tubes of oils, brushes, rags and turps
(greenish grey in a jam-jar) clutter the paint-stained table.
Canvases blaze from every wall. Your wooden bed— angled
to the right in the foreground — mattress bare, pillow stained.
Yet even you could never show the heat that beats through roof
tiles, the trace of lavender left by Émile Bernard’s handkerchief
rice and cabbage from the kitchen or carbolic that Adeline used
on the boards yesterday, before your friends gathered.
You would need yellow ochre for petals spilled in the corner
beside the white cloth which cover your coffin.
Your brother pale and thin, is reflected in the mirror on the far
wall with his wife Johanna — a presence at his side but apart.
The shadow of their argument with you three weeks ago
is almost too large for a single frame to hold.
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David Parsley: A Rumored Demise "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him --- you and I… What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives” Nietzsche, The Gay Science I too expected more: a denunciation to grab the navel with its black hook, spook sparrows from my ficus fomenting a movement to stoke or darken something, the sun maybe or at least the planetarium doors. This notice with its tired ironies refreshing prior guidelines: check grips in advance for stains; the coot with the lantern will not be coming, repeat, not coming. The curious decide to attend. It's more than odd, casket gaping its recently swabbed mouth, distended lips reflecting cloud cover suspended above the open dig. No obvious wounds show. They handle that kind of thing. Some leave immediately, one woman supported on either side. “My sister told me not to come! It doesn't even look like him!” Tallish people in lab coats busy themselves with needles nodding in satisfaction, grant brief statements. The pluck-bearded man wearing a tool belt appears shouldering a heft of long and short beams, nails, strides quickly through. He pauses to glance down the chopped edges of silence, around those present catching my gaze. Consider what the dead do.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Benjamin Rosser: Butcher Block
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Ian is dead, a butcher by trade, beef brisket rump and flank, top sirloin rib and shank, these primal cuts he often made. Ian is gone, idle tools still gleam, breaking knife meat grinder, boning knife meat slicer, sharp hooks and saws a polished team. An artist, his brushes keen blades, sub-primal cuts, sales cuts, cleaving cold flesh from bone and fat from meat, all wrapped and neat. Ian took up what there was to do, training on the job when there was no other job, honing his craft with life’s bills due. Unfinished, frayed grey drawings, yellowed portfolio pushed under his porch, old trikes, trunks, and other weary things. Ian is mourned, meat market shades down, customers forsaken, no British back bacon, funeral morn a solemn grey town. Ian smoked himself to death, animal friend at the end, secret vegan, “my charcoals please” — his sudden, next-to-last breath.
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Karen Jane Cannon: How to shore up a cliff A day of too many gnawing anxieties. Outside is ochre and terracotta sunlight bouncing against striped bands of cliff face, pitted by many gales Each colour is a memory of millennia stability amongst flux now slowly collapsing I stare up at a blue crescent of slippage I wonder if anyone else sees this catastrophe To shore up a cliff you need deep roots — shrubs of holm oaks, ivy, tree lupin with racemes of fragrant yellow you’ll need great groynes of rock — sandstone like bastions of seals for the tide to break against if all else fails concrete walls curved stoutly to take the sheer weight of stressBack to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana: When I photograph nine oyster catchers at North Berwick I fail to capture how they’re almost falling over each other at the water’s edge, heads tilted towards Bass Rock, in the distance. And there’s no evidence in my photo of their jizz, that funny little scurry along the beach. And in the pic I took of you, Glenn, on your birthday, it’s impossible to see the puckering of your lips, as you ask: am I a blenny, or a goby fish? Or hear us debate whether Bass Rock is white because of the gannets’ wings, or their shit. And although coffee-coloured sunspots show your age, laugh lines don’t betray the arguments that day. The fact that we couldn’t relax. Never did get to the Auld Hoose for a birthday pint. I remember our conversation about another beach and another photo, of you, aged two, at Margate, striking a silly pose beside Mickey Mouse. The photo doesn’t show how you wore-out the photographer with the Disney cut-out. Followed him, asking questions. And it doesn’t show that this distraction, this infinite capacity for questioning, is your thing. If you were a bird, we’d call it your jizz. Your favourite poet calls it inscape: your peculiarities, your you-ness. The stuff we can’t translate. Jizz: the sum total of all the characteristics that make a bird species unique. (birding-world.com)Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Maggie Freeman: Ice-fishing on Ganymede Forget the journey the crashed craft the fact you can’t get back. You are here, that’s what counts. Open the door to the yellow sunrise. Step out on the ice surface. You won’t slip. Gritty debris shed over millennia makes your footing secure. Shipwreck’s behind you. Rescue from it what you can. In your silver suit and ice boots drag your sled stacked high with thermal drill and coiled line across the bare arc of this moon. How tiny you seem, like a fly trapped in an arid museum but you have hands apt to assemble your thermal drill, a mind free to remember this moon’s composition - how the globe of its ocean is a water container vaster than all the old oceans of Earth. It’s crusted with thirty-four kilometres of ice. Take your time with that drill. You’ll get through in due course.
Now drop in your line.
It’s very long and micro-fine.
Sit there, wait and consider
what you may catch, what may live
in that great ocean, seaweed, and plankton
fused together into remarkable life.
.
Ganymede is one of the moons of Jupiter.
A mission has recently set off to search for signs of life there.
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Back to poet list…
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Baraa Alassi lives in London and is studying business at Uxbridge college. This is his first published poem.
Jean Atkin’s latest publications are Fan-peckled (Fair Acre Press) and The Bicycles of Ice and Salt (Indigo Dreams). Her third full collection High Nowhere is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams. Recent work in Pennine Platform, Raceme, Anthropocene, Finished Creatures, One Hand Clapping and Acumen. She works as a poet in education and community.
John Bartlett is the author of eight books-fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize. He reviews and podcasts at beyondtheestuary.com and lives on the southern coast of Australia
Denise Bundred was a consultant paediatric cardiologist and began writing poetry in retirement. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and has an MA in Writing.. She won the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2016, coming second in 2019. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies and poetry magazines and her pamphlet, Litany of a Cardiologist, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020.
Lesley Burt’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and online. She is a member of the Tears in the Fence Workshop and Festival groups. Her pamphlet, Mr & Mrs Andrews Reframed, will appear in 2023, published by Templar Poetry.
Karen Jane Cannon is a Creative PhD Candidate at the University of Southampton, researching poetry and place. The Salterns, her third poetry pamphlet, is due to be published in 2024 by Nine Pens Press. She was the winner of The Hamish Canham Prize 2022, commended for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2021, shortlisted for The Bridport Prize in 2019, and a finalist in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2017.
Nicola Carter is a new poet, having worked for more than 40 years as an NHS doctor, mainly in the areas of Community Sexual Health and Inner City General Practice. Patients’ stories as well as personal and professional experiences are currently the main focus of her writing.
Phil Connolly is married and lives near York. He taught for many years in North Africa and the Middle East. He was shortlisted in the Wordsworth Trust Competition and has been published in several anthologies and magazines including Dream Catcher, The High Window, London Grip, The Moth, The North and Pennine Platform.
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana‘s debut collection Sing me down from the dark was published by SALT in 2022. Her work is published widely, most recently in PN Review, The Moth, Tears in the Fence and Fenland Poetry Journal. Her website is: alexandracorrintachibana.com
Julian Dobson has had work published in a variety of print and online journals, including Shearsman, Orbis, Pennine Platform and Ink, Sweat & Tears. He is a previous winner of the Guernsey international poetry competition, and lives in Sheffield.
Anthony Dolphin (born Tittensor, 1968) stopped working in his daylight job (in language education and teacher training) in 2020 but continues to work making music (with the band Santa Sprees) and art when energy permits. He has never submitted poetry anywhere before and is presently daunted by the vast supply-side surfeit of content and mildly ashamed to have arrived at a crowded station called what-the-hell-do-I-do-with-all-this-unsolicited-stuff-I-have-written.
Briege Duffaud is an Irish writer of fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in various publications including The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, French Literary Review, Acumen, Orbis, Frogmore Papers …She has also published two novels and a story collection. She lives in London.
Robert Etty lives in Lincolnshire. His most recent collection, Planes Flying Over, was published in 2020 by Shoestring Press.
Maggie Freeman has had poems published in magazines including The North, Poetry Wales, Acumen and others. Her three historical novels are available with Lume Books. Her long procrastinated-over novel The Wives of Canute is published in early summer.
Julie Gardner is currently a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. She is writing a critical / creative thesis on how fear and hope is revealed in women’s poetry. She taught in primary schools for over forty years.
Chrissie Gittins’ poetry collections are Armature (Arc), I’ll Dress One Night As You (Salt) and Sharp Hills (Indigo Dreams). She appeared on BBC Countryfile with her fifth children’s collection, Adder Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books). She has received Arts Council and Author’s Foundation awards and features on the Poetry Archive. Her recent poems are published in Perverse, The Blue Nib, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, High Window, Acumen and in the anthologies Women On Nature (Unbound), Wonder (Natural History Museum/Macmillan), A Poet for Every Day of The Year (Macmillan), Empty Nest (Picador), and Night Feeds and Morning Songs (Trapeze)
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. New work is upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.
Jack Heslop is an English literature graduate from Essex. He lives and work in Colchester, and has been reading and writing poetry for pleasure since he was 15.
Lynne Hjelmgaard has published four collections of poetry. Her 5th collection, The Turpentine Tree, will be published with Seren in Oct. 2023
Glen Hunting is a writer living in Alice Springs, Central Australia. His poetry has been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, Meniscus, Burrow, Portside Review, and elsewhere
Colin Ian Jeffery is a modernist poet, a movement with development of imagism stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and has a strong reaction against war, tyranny, and oppression of truth and innocence, but unlike other poets in the modernism movement like Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound he has a profound faith in God.
Alison Jones’ work has been widely published in journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Proletarian Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets, Heartwood (2018) and Omega (2020) were published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a full collection.
Phil Kirby’s collections are Watermarks (Arrowhead, 2009) and The Third History (Lapwing, 2018). Poems have appeared more recently in Poetry Ireland, Stand, The High Window and others. He is Treasurer of the Fire River Poets group in Taunton
Vyacheslav Konoval is a Ukrainian poet whose work is devoted to the most pressing social problems of our time, such as poverty, ecology, relations between the people and the government, and war. His poems have appeared in many magazines and translated into Spanish, French, Scottish, and Polish
Rustin Larson‘s writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). Recent poems have appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, London Grip, Poetry East, The Lake, Poetryspace, Pirene’s Fountain, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His chapbook The Cottage on the Hill was published by Cyberwit.net in April of 2022. He is on faculty in Maharishi International University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
Maëlle Leggiadro is a French writer, filmmaker and actress. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Directing. She’s a multi-awarded director and she’s published online by The Hysteria Collective and Empoword Journalism. (This work is protected by the SACD services)
Konstandinos Mahoney has two prizewinning collections of poetry – Tutti Frutti, Sentinel Press (2019) and The Great Comet of 1996 Foretells, Live Cannon (2022), both reviewed in London Grip.
Jacob Mckibbin is a poet from Oxford. He has recently had work in Oxford Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears.
Caleb Murdock is a 72-year-old American who worked as a word-processing operator for most of his life. He had writer’s block until he was about 67, when approaching mortality fixed that problem. Having tripled his output in just five years he is now seeking publication late in life
New Zealand poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play (Proverse), 2013, Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP) 2016 & Deadpan (Otago UP) 2019. His latest collection Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press) was published in 2023. He was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2022.
Michael O’Brien is a poet and playwright. He lives in Chesterfield, New Jersey with his wife Marie and his daughter Penelope. He has BA in political science from Richard Stockton University and a Masters of Teaching degree from The College of New Jersey. He currently teaches young adults on the Autistic Spectrum and writes in his spare time.
David W. Parsley is an engineer/manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he works during the day (okay, and some nights and weekends) on interplanetary probes and rovers. In addition to previous appearance in London Grip, his poems appear in Footnote (forthcoming), Amethyst, Tiny Seed, Autumn Sky Poetry, and other journals and anthologies.
Stuart Pickford is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award. His first collection, The Basics, was published by Redbeck Press and shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection prize. His second collection, Swimming with Jellyfish was published by smith/doorstop. Stuart lives in Harrogate and taught in a local comprehensive school
Colin Pink’s poems have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines. He has published four collections: Acrobats of Sound, (Poetry Salzburg Press, 2016), The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament, (Against the Grain, 2019), Typicity, (Vole, 2021) and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy (Paekakariki Press, 2021). He posts a six line poem every day on Instagram @colinpinkpoet
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press), Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose (BrickHouse Books), and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press).
Bethany W Pope has won many literary awards and published several novels and collections of poetry. Bethany’s most recent books include, Silage (poetry, Indigo Dreams), Masque (novel, Seren), and The Hungry And The Lost (novel, Parthian). Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described Bethany’s latest book as ‘poetry as salvation’…..’This harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape.’ Bethany currently lives and works in China.
Benjamin WC Rosser is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan where his areas of research and teaching were, respectively, cell biology and human anatomy. His poetry has been published in Consilience Journal and London Grip. He currently resides retired in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife Corinne and children Isabel and Oliver
Carla Scarano D’Antonio obtained her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and has published work in various magazines. Her first short collection was Negotiating Caponata (Dempsey & Windle 2020). She completed her PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading in 2021. Her second collection is Workwear (The High Window 2022). She and Keith Lander won the first prize of the Dryden Translation Competition 2016 with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems
Oleg Semonov currently resides and works as a freelance translator in the city of Dnipro (Ukraine). His work has appeared in Electric Acorn, Eclectica, Poetic Diversity, London Grip and elsewhere
Jill Sharp’s poems have appeared most recently in The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review,and PERVERSE and are forthcoming in Stand. Her pamphlet, Ye gods, was published by Indigo Dreams, and her work featured in Vindication, a 6-poet anthology from Arachne Press. She was runner-up in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize.
Elizabeth Smither’s latest collection of poems, My American Chair was published by Auckland University Press in 2022. The Amando Caruso handkerchief is larger than a normal fine cotton Italian designer handkerchief
Paul Stephenson has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance) and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press). He co-edited Magma issue 70 on ‘Europe’. He co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh and lives between Cambridge and Brussels. He interviews poets at paulstep.com. Instagram: paulstep456 / Twitter: @stephenson_pj
James Thellusson has written for The Oldie, The Nightwatchman and other magazines. His anthology of the bad school reports of the rich and famous – School’s Out, truants, troublemakers and teachers’ pets – was published last November
Judith Wozniak has an MA in Writing Poetry. Her poems have appeared in London Grip, The Alchemy Spoon, South, Sideways, The Frogmore Papers and These are the Hands NHS Anthology. She won first prize in the Hippocrates Competition, 2020. Her pamphlet, Patient Watching, was published by Hedgehog Press in January 2022.