May 31 2025
London Grip New Poetry – Summer 2025
ISSUE 56 OF LONDON GRIP NEW POETRY features poems by:
*Sam Szanto *Joseph Blythe *Barbara Howerska *Ross Jackson
*Rosie Jackson *Angela France *Norton Hodges *Tony Dawson
*Jim Murdoch *Jeff Gallagher *Ceinwen Haydon *Lewis Wyn Davies
*Peter Surkov *Pam Job *Michael Carrino *Alexis Deese-Smith
*Ben Banyard *John Bartlett *Sue Wallace-Shaddad *Dan Burns
*Pam Zinnemann-Hope *Graham Clifford *Philip Gross *Andrew Sclater
*Phil Wood *Bridgette James *Sue Norton *Dan Janoff
*Helen McSherry *Rebecca Gethin *Stephen Bone *Jeff Skinner
*Cos Michael *Neil Douglas *Gareth Adams *Katharine James
*Özge Lena *Ken Cockburn *John Whitehouse *Colin Pink
*Vanessa Ackerman *Sue Rose
Contributor Biographies and Editor’s Notes are also included.
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printable version of this issue can be found at LG New Poetry Summer 2025
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send up to THREE poems & a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Our submission windows are January, April, June & October
Please do not include us in simultaneous submissions
*
Editor’s notes
Recently I found myself idly wondering who I think I’m writing for when I’m working on a poem. Motoring journalists or restaurant critics might be able to visualise their target audience with reasonable accuracy; but it is harder to conjure up a picture that fairly represents the small but variegated section of the population which reads poetry magazines. Yet it is only from this latter group that I can expect to get any attention. A poem about my grandfather’s vintage Daimler (even with its fluid flywheel fluently described and its pre-selector gearbox turned into a telling metaphor for loss of free-will) is unlikely to come to the notice of a reader of Practical Classics. Similarly, the chances of my sonnet on a soufflé appearing in the BBC’s Good Food Magazine are vanishingly small since its editor would probably calculate that a casual browser would be more inclined to pay to read a page of prose than to invest in something shaped like a poem.
There may be poets who can see a particular editor or a competition judge as a real person with whom they are in communication rather than as an anonymous ambusher to be outwitted. Others, perhaps, have someone from their poetry workshop in mind when they are composing (Alice/Arthur is really going to enthuse/quibble about this!). Alternative author-imagined consumers of poetry might include a fond parent who must be reassured or an over-critical teacher who must be refuted. It would also be interesting to find out whether such notional audiences are thought of as readers or hearers….
… but instead I want to suggest that most poets are essentially writing for themselves and for the satisfaction of solving whatever poetic puzzles are set by the current theme, tone and form. Generalising from my own experience, I believe we’re all hoping for one of those where did that come from? moments which yield mouthfuls of crisp or chewy consonants or sweetly chiming internal rhymes. As one draft succeeds another aren’t we simply seeking to persuade our inner consciousness to whisper back a clinching, perfectly expressed image, analogy or metaphor? And we’d love it to be startling enough to knock us off our chair – as happens to the protagonist in Tirzah Garwood’s curious engraving The Man Who Was Answered By His Own Self which Is this issue’s header image.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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Sam Szanto: The Young Man on the Train
sits alone at a table for four,
red-haired and too big for his skin,
tapping a pen on the plastic,
tap tap like a child’s heart.
When his phone rings, I stare at my half-formed poem
so I don’t appear to be listening. It’s his father,
for whom he’s been saving the seats.
‘Where are you?’ he asks, smiling.
His dad will get on at the next station,
I ascertain. ‘With Tanya?’ The young man’s face
has the smell of sour milk. We draw in
to Polegate and no one gets on.
The phone rings. ‘Whatever, I’m not bothered,’
the young man says, several times, voice limp as a dead fish.
He calls a sibling or a friend: ‘He’ll have told Tanya
I’m on the train and she’s refused to sit with me,
she does this kind of thing.’ At Lewes, his dad calls again.
He seems to believe he’s on a different train.
‘You don’t have to come, honestly,
I’m not bothered. Do your thing.’
At Haywards Heath, the halfway point,
the train gets busier
and a middle-aged lady tries to sit
at the young man’s table.
‘Sorry, I’m waiting for people,
they’re getting on at this station,’ — although no one’s
on the platform or moving down the train.
‘You sure?’ she asks. ‘Where are they then?’
At Gatwick, a volta, the train full of tanned people
and huge daylight-bright suitcases. The young man has to
share his table with three women
speaking a different language. He stares at his phone.
.
At Victoria, he gets up and our eyes meet.
I want to say maybe Tanya isn’t entirely to blame
and his dad will need him more one day.
I close my notebook and leave the train.
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***
Joseph Blythe: The Strange Serenity of a Train Platform on a Winter’s Night Only the heaves and sighs of struggling engines forced to do the tiny journeys between northern nowhere towns. An orange glow from the timetable. The next train from platform 2 is delayed by six minutes. Delayed by what? Has the darkness become impenetrable, a lake of oil? A young girl has air pods in, her head down, hands in pockets. I am watching the tracks for signs of movement. There is nothing in the world beyond this floodlit platform except the other one over the lines, uninhabited. A train pulls in at platform 1. No one gets on. No one gets off. It waits, then breathes closed and moves on through the dark. The wind follows behind it, rushing to fill the space and the silence. The air is cold to the touch. The orange light flickers. We both keep waiting.
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Barbara Howerska: Sister Rosetta Tharpe is rocking the platform with rhythm and blues. She’s stepping back and sideways, with her white electric guitar, turning and moving with the beat. She’s a sassy woman winter coat and high-heeled shoes singing on an old railway station; she’s rocking rainy Manchester 1964. She’s singing Didn’t it Rain children. Driving that guitar with motion and a cool, strong voice. The rainswept audience on the other side of the track are clapping, swaying, cheering. Young people wearing duffle coats, stare adoringly. Rosetta’s jewelled collar is catching the light. She’s been rocking since the thirties. Born of gospel, between church and nightclub. Growing music, seeding music halls of fame. This train is a clean train, this train. This train is a Jesus train, this train. Somewhere back in time when life was only black and white she sang.
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Ross Jackson: In the hardest half hour
my quarter opened bedroom door
chink of moon
my brain empanelled in this wood crafted room
first train of the day soaks up water, takes on coal
half an hour’s thinking time
to luxuriate
play with a chain of iambs
plans revolve in my cerebellum’s
triple-barrelled chamber
I should get up and write
the script for today
but this hardest half hour’s
infected by procrastination
next to the skin
I pat the dog-eared Oblomov
on my bedside table
well, ‘time, time and the dividing of time’
as my late father used to say
proverbial gristle not easy to cut through
by a blade not so keen
in the hardest half hour
time, time and the dividing of time is a mangled version of Daniel 7:25
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Rosie Jackson: Letter to a Fellow Poet for John Freeman Thanks for swapping books. I read yours on the long train journey home, excited to discover we are both fans of Jack Gilbert. That Icarus poem of his you mention is one of my favourites too – the delicious But on which it hinges so tiny and so huge: but life is not a failure simply because we fall. And as I look at the feel and structure of your poems, I can see the affinity. The way you too stand on everyday turf: bookshop, woodwork lesson, a woman cleaning linoleum. Then how you open a shutter – nothing grand – more a perhaps than a certainty, more a stepping aside than confrontation, welcoming whatever blossom may want to drift your way, your thought an emptying, a listening, willing to be haunted for years by something you’ve read or seen: one line, one moment, a talk with a stranger. The exact personae are occasionally a little puzzling, but I imagine it’s your sometime wife, or sometime partner, you sit with as she’s dying, a greater love borrowing your face to smile at her. The same kind of love that spills from Gilbert, a mix of eros and agape, one leading into the other, the same love that lies buried in the best poems waiting to be opened like a seam, the promise of coal shining there. Not that you’re glittery – no bling – the only name-dropping those much-loved poets who fill your days, your nights, your afterthoughts: Rilke, Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse, Anne Cluysenaar. But it was turning the page onto your ‘Letter to Jack Gilbert’ that jolted me, its title the same as a poem I’d been planning. It felt uncanny, as if I’d stumbled on something I’d forgotten I’d written (that happens sometimes), much as I’d been taken aback when I came across Gilbert’s ‘Letter to John Keats’, also the title of one of mine. There are those, I know, who regard poems which address other poets as writerly indulgences. But I prefer to think of letters between poets as a kind of celebration of our shared inhabiting of the other world that sits so patiently inside this one. All that hot afternoon on the train, speeding past newly green and yellow fields, I was lifted into that space which can be reached only through this world, when the world is most fully itself as it leaves itself behind. It was like coming back to that subtle, remarkable moment of pause – another tiny yet huge hiatus – when breath changes from in to out and the mystery of things starts to flow in a different way, is experienced differently: how life itself depends on it. And I’m glad – if, frankly, a little envious – to hear that Jack Gilbert heard your letter poem read out to him shortly before he died, gave it his thumbs up. God knows, we all need some recognition at the last, to boost us through the silent turbulence. And please give my best to your partner, I’m sorry we weren’t introduced. So much smiling in her face, I kept looking round to see if I’d missed something, something that might lift my own face out of its tragedy. Nothing extravagant, not Gilbert’s avalanche of joy, just the kind of simple things you’re so good at honouring: the first swallow, the skin of an apple tree, a clarinet playing faintly next door.
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Angela France: Lao tóng
for Ann Drysdale
Yesterday it was a helleborine in the woods,
too late. The seasons continue to drift,
sending small flags of distress
up through the earth where people tread.
The other day there was a post online,
a humble-brag we’d have laughed about,
indulged in some just-between-us guilty gossip.
Today it was the leucistic crow.
It has come to the garden every day
since I told you about it, always alone.
We worried that it was rejected
for being too different, too eccentric.
Today it was with a black crow,
It has found a mate, it isn’t lonely anymore.
*
The ancient Chinese had a phrase, Lao tóng,
for ‘heart sisters’; women friends closer
than man and wife. We don’t have a word
for the loss of such a friend, nor a word
for the one left. Where is the language
for the ache of your boots in the cupboard,
the stick you oiled in the hall. There is no word
for my reaching for the phone to tell you,
the bone-deep pang of pulling back.
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Norton Hodges: Nostalgia
i.m. A.E. Housman
I have no blue remembered hills,
only the pavements I trod on my way to school,
and no lads who sadly marched away,
only the aunts and uncles who disappeared
one by one to cancer or old age.
I have no land of lost content,
only the gardens, long or short,
where I was sent while the adults
had their important chats
as lizards basked out in the sun.
But often, like him, I look back to find
somewhere so safe I was unaware:
playing toy soldiers on my grandparents’ floor
at the feet of indulgent grown-ups,
long ago, when the battle lines were clear.
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Tony Dawson: Portrait of W.H. Auden at 58
In his final years, lungs racked with coughing
as he hacked his way towards his coffin,
Auden’s face displayed deep ingrained lines,
the products of unhealthy living and sure signs
of late nights spent on verse he loved to write.
His face hit by a spider’s web at the speed of light.
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Jim Murdoch: What Survives of Stevie
I knew it was a good line the moment it hit me.
Quite took my breath away.
Before the ink was dry.
Even before I’d dotted the i’s.
Naturally I knew.
I settled myself with a strong cup of tea
and two custard creams not realising
(how ever could I?)
that that was that;
after so few years at t’face mulishly
(or, some would say, asininely)
ploughing my own seam
I might as well call it a day,
hang up my hard hat
and set the canary free.
I expect Philip felt much the same
when he wrote that rot about love.
Stevie Smith was born in 1903 in Hull, Yorkshire and Philip Larkin lived in Hull
from March 1955 until his death.
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Jeff Gallagher: ‘I Do Not Remember This Day’
William will be remembering some assault to the senses,
the stolen boat, that bridge, those d----d daffodils.
William remembers everything, chewing scraps of emotion
like a wasp, building a vast store of recollection.
William can wander beside lakes, beneath trees, his fine pen
pricking out smiles and stings to be carved into words.
William knows God. They exchange pleasantries in verse
and drink claret, asking each other important questions.
William fears progress. His tranquillity is disturbed by dreams
in which the rivers dry and the clouds are turned black.
I am the stem to his flower, hidden beneath the spritely dance
of his growing, patiently noting anything of significance.
I am the day to day, hidden by mob cap or bonnet, shy face
tilted towards the earth, recording all for posterity.
I am frightened of these hills, my fear pressed like a leaf
among receipts and prayers and household accounts.
I have tried to be a poet like my brother – but I am a woman
and must hide my true self beneath manners and corsetry.
I do not remember this day. There is nothing to write of
save for my brother laughing and crying to the grey sky.
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Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon: Emerging Viragos We are a tribe of late-comers to the writing game. Women who have spent our lives spinning plates in home and hearth, communities and workplaces. We know first-hand of birth and death, love and loss— and how to comfort others. We know less of how to make our voices heard above men’s growls. We fear being silenced at this critical hour. This, our last chance to speak our truths, before earth’s soil claims us.
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Lewis Wyn Davies: It goes a bit like this… M’s up. She’s giving it her all. She’s twisting her face like a pretzel as she reads. Her fingertips stretch and shoot energy across the atmosphere, through the wires and piping. Her voice is poised. Her eyes are the perfect balance of focus and joy. She’s doing this for everyone who craves the very opportunity. And she’s faultless. Flawless. The best she’s been. Her final line could spark a rivalry. Heat radiates from her body as she looks down upon her destiny. The clapping from her modest family echoes around empty seats until a booming voice calls out from the speakers: Thank you, M. Now, please welcome, C! Suddenly, the big metal exit doors burst open and by the time C passes M on stage, the place is brimming. C reads a solid haiku and the whole floor shakes so hard it can be heard in the fields of a rural county.
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Peter Surkov: After your send-off After your send-off I forgot you were dead. I looked to see you sidling up carrying a paper plate with sausage rolls, eyebrow raised at our readings. ‘Do Not Go Gentle’? Really? After your send-off I thought of the photos with the lifted gown, your prudent caption don’t open at work. And how, days later, you freed yourself of oxygen mask, walked down the ward, and died in a different bed.
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Pam Job: Beached
Or, I could be sitting in my garden – not
in a deckchair
and the blackbird would come to sing me out
or the robin
and the dye would run down my face -
pink, not black, like his
and Rudy Giuliani’s
and I would remember Venice,
and Ezra Pound’s grave
and the snail trails, tracing my name
over his in San Michele
at the end of the row.
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Michael Carrino: One Morning Late in March On the shoreline's edge ice is melting, a thick mist edges closer, a neighbor from the north end of the beach approaches me, announces his urgent need to have a will. I nod and he goes on about having his intentions concerning possessions, money, and property in firm order, unquestionable, who was to have what and when. He mentions he is leaning toward cremation, but is not sure if his ashes might be kept in an urn, on a mantle or table, or lifted on a warm breeze, disappear over a seaside town where he once was calm. He asks if I know a lawyer. The ice keeps melting, perhaps a promise of a day warmer than yesterday. I respond with more than a nod and time eases past steals the mist, leaving a hint of sunlight. Before our conversation is over he tells me his life has been unremarkable, most desires elusive. All he wants now if possible is a clean plan. At least have one clean plan in writing.
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Alexis Deese-Smith: she did not stop for death this one did not plan accordingly— dressed unfashionably in hair and gown, she arrived for death windswept, curls blown astray, hems ragged and muddy, boot laces undone. she was late, if you can believe it, nearly out of the breath she was fated to lose. there was no note pressed with flowers kissed to the kitchen table, no handkerchief aching of rosewater. in complete disregard for tradition, she entered death alive, clawing at the present tense with a heathenism that rolled the romantics in their graves. it’s why she’s never in their stories, more banshee than spectre, bless her heart and she’d do well not to look so pleased roaming those godforsaken moors.
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Ben Banyard: Cryonaut Vanity, perhaps, the desperation, with money no object, to be thawed, revived, cured of your fate. Or curiosity maybe, the wish to inhabit the future, dwell in new times where nothing makes sense. Just a head, in your case, awaits a download, the ultimate external hard drive. It takes faith in human nature, the Hippocratic Oath stretched wafer-thin, crystallised in ice.
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John Bartlett: Within These Yearning Arms, I Have Enough * *from JS Bach’s cantata Ich Habe Genug (BWV 82) for Michael 1. In Manila’s Cathedral of St John the Baptist widowed mothers, like stone angels, crawl on bare knees to touch, revere the statue of the Black Nazarene 2. I walk to the spot above the beach where we last met strong Easterlies send windsurfers scudding – here you vowed to return to your love of running 3. In Lane Cove I help you from the car my arms around you your limbs heavy against me when did you become this old man I would weep if I could remember how 4. Now I touch this place above the beach on knees unbended where love still lingers and and in this revere I have enough
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Sue Wallace-Shaddad: Handover I have long struggled to cut the nails on my right hand, botching the task. Now I have your manicure scissors, their tiny sharp blades cut right through. Such a useful legacy. As I file with an emery board, I miss dipping your fingers in warm water to loosen the chocolate cake of care home meals, doing my best to calm you when you recited I don’t remember, stroking your hand, so knarled with rheumatism. Womanly-wise you would suddenly grasp my hand and, in a gentle voice, ask after me.
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Dan Burns: A Dream of Heaven begins with a forgiving hand outstretched, and cricketers dancing in the haze of a cloud. Time never rots nor reeks -- even filth can be cleansed. Where does stagnant water go, if not skywards?
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Pam Zinnemann-Hope: I walk through the door The basement knows and the rooms upstairs and the hallway knows. It’s in the empty air. Is it a missing smell? That’s how an animal can tell. I’ve seen it in a dog who came every day to visit our dog. He came and he sniffed the path the day after. Then went away and never came back. The things in the house are no longer cherished, they’ve lost their meaning. I stand in the hall and call, Where are you?
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Graham Clifford: His Plan Some facts are irrefutable like imperfections in skirting boards or how an architrave felt wrong. We know his plan is to blow his brains out if she goes first. He doesn’t own a gun and he wouldn’t have the bottle, anyway. She knows. She will have whispered don’t be so stupid smiling, suggesting that evening they have a Chinese takeaway and another stiff Bacardi and diet coke to take their minds off it. This fact rips the lining in me, like seeing an ape on TikTok stroke a dead cat it was allowed to own only partly for scientific purposes. Her plan is many more, bright Aprils in aspic.
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Philip Gross: Dear Words… Dear Silence… Not him, not her, no way. They couldn’t abide each other. With a passion. So it was no surprise to anyone but them, the day they stumbled into love. Words tripped, a sudden hush fell on the room, mid sentence. Then the blurt of truth. The moment, staring. Then the blush. The years of easy marriage: how they’d fill each other’s gaps, or be them, natural as in-breath/out-breath. Then the first row. One’s affair. (Reader, you think you know which of them it would be? Discuss…) Then how they mended into couple-ness, to-fro, a well-consorted bickering, their faults each other’s care, a kind of grooming after all. Words left more unsaid, or like a clear stream flowed unheeded and unhindered to reveal the silent pebble bed. Speak gently now of the skill of the old, making love with, no, out of a tenderness towards each other’s failings, which escapes the young. And last, the years that must come, when one, when either, each one, will miss the other like part of their self, being gone.
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Andrew Sclater: An Evening Together She walks in Jane Austen's withdrawing- room, withdrawn among the chintz covers, imagining debacles and dark French lovers. Henry sleeps on his sofa, soaring over fences on a thoroughbred, cleaning twelve-bores in the boot room, or casting for trout in a midgy gloom, blind to the woman he wed. His dogs and horses are wholly his, but she is not. She is an undemonstrative Scot. Stepping up breathless to the ball at Mansfield Park, two hundred years before, she's greeted at the great oak door. The men she likes are tall, and military, and dead. Henry sleeps through dreams of pheasants taking flight while she goes waltzing through the candlelight. Her partner is another bore. Occasionally, she weeps. Her antique books and candlesticks are hers, but he is not. She is an uncomplaining Scot. No matter the arthritis, she wanders over lost demesnes. The stucco in the stair remains quite wonderful. How bright the light is. How the shadows lengthen the pilasters. And the gorgeous chandelier, my dear, Murano glass! And, goodness, where’s the brigadier...? Henry dreams of trade unions and industrial disasters. The marriage is theirs, and yet it's not. Too much has been lost. One hell of a lot for an English sportsman and his unsporting Scot. If she explains, he answers ‘Tommyrot!’ She would like to tell him... tell him what? Last thing, he downs one final tot. She leaves me crying in my cot. She is an undemonstrative Scot. This unlikely bride and groom each undress in a separate room. Andrew Sclater: At Home With The Parents There was a sofa on which they did not sit together. It was floral. He lounged on it and crumpled it while she sat straight in her chintzy chair or lowered her head to write letters in blue-black ink. He would pronounce and she’d reply, subdued. They went on like that till he dozed off. At meals, they’d keep as far apart as they could. The table was large and round, and stood very central on a pillar pedestal. Something formal and awkward about it all. One day, out of the blue, she said Two’s company -- three’s none. It was strange for her to speak first. Me there too between them.
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Phil Wood: Prospective Parent For Space Boy They are strolling along the shoreline, side by side, not hand in hand, not yet...and talking, about something other than me. Not now, but soon. I follow their footprints, which this tide will rub out for sure. I lick my rainbow lollipop, which is shaped like a rocket. I give them space. Enough to hold hands.
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Bridgette James: Journal Entries of a Failed Mother February 2024 -- i am not a sanctuary. i am the swirling champagne glass in my hand that I hide under the sofa when my son walks in. July 2024 -- i am a half-packed suitcase i never go on holiday. My son won’t travel – His doctor warns, deep-rooted fear of flying is like debris in a blocked sink. August 2024 -- i am a paper gravedigger. To eradicate my son’s phobias, i list them on a Post-it I bury in a pretend casket under the kitchen window where creeping buttercup flower then die. September 2024 -- i’m the flower-killer. i never water things so i ignore the packets of lawn seeds in the garden centre. November 2024 – I’m a refuge-collector. i sweep up carcasses of dead holiday plans in my sleep. At night i trawl cemeteries for headstone-gaps to bury my dead flowers. December 2024 -- i’m stuck in the pattern of the swirl stem of my broken wine glass & shard glass clogs up my sink like debris. January 2025 - My son says: aeroplanes kill people. One crashed in Washington DC. In my sleep ‘i cry me a River' - the Potomac. It harbours corpses of aeroplane passengers and my resolution to try & be a better mum in the New Year.
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Sue Norton: What Mum thought about Grandma In her ninety-fourth year, Grandma slept in a single bed downstairs. Stripping the sheets, we found them darned, topped and tailed, a penitential patchwork. New sheets Mum had bought, Grandma kept For my old age. Untouched, they snoozed in crackled plastic, saved, as she saved herself. And for what? said Mum. She did nothing, but wore out other people. Mum took the sheets, but chucked five chocolate bars, gone mouldy in their foil. For pity’s sake said Mum. She never enjoyed her life, and now it’s gone.
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Dan Janoff: Visiting the Dead My shrunken mother and I huddle together before his gravestone. She grasps my hand, her fingers like skeleton keys from a foundling hospital. I see her reflected in the polished black granite a ghost in the monument. She complains of small stones left by visitors as dirty and messy. She’d clean it and buff it like she patted and brushed my father. As if a spotless memorial could contain her loss.
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Helen McSherry: You Tell Us Your Mother Is An Actress
In memory of Sarah Kelly
You tell us she is in London and lives in an apartment.
You tell us your mother will be famous,
and when she is, she will come home
and get you. Your granda is our lollipop man.
He used to be in the Navy and shouts all aboard!
before he ferries us across the road. Your granny
is the cleaner of our school, she keeps everything
shipshape. When you tell us you will become
an actress just like your mammy, I believe you,
because you have this beautiful jet black hair, and something
about you reminds me of Snow White.
On the day we go to school and you’re not there,
they tell us you won’t be back. They tell us, yesterday
was the last time we’d cross the road on your granda’s boat,
the last time your granny would clean our decks.
The day after the coffins (you had the wee white one)
were carried up to the altar in the church where we
made our Holy Communion, I go round to your house to look
through the blank windows and see if it’s true that glass can melt
and pebbledash can turn to slush. I don’t understand why
my nostrils sting when the fire has gone out, I don’t know why
I need to squint my eyes when there is no light.
They tell us your granda was found trying to get to your room,
they tell us you were found fast asleep,
they tell us they found your granny downstairs in the armchair
with an ashtray at her feet. They say, may their souls
and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.
And they tell us to say, Amen.
On the day of the funeral your mammy comes home to get you.
Someone tells us she isn’t an actress, but I don’t believe them,
because even when she cries and cries until her hair is soaked,
something about her reminds me of snow white.
Helen McSherry: Cycling Through Cathays Cemetery
On the days you go to your dad’s, I cycle with you
along the side of the Recreation Grounds,
bags on our backs with school books
and uniforms, creams for psoriasis.
We don’t stop to laugh at the geese
crossing the road over to Roath Park Lake,
we swerve,
they are just another obstacle in our path.
You, my middle child, lead us
through the side streets, thrusting out your arm
at each right turn,
you take us into the cemetery, the arching gates
too grand for our small cortège.
The three of you fly
down the hill between the graves. I slow
this gravel feels deadly under wheel.
Yew trees mark the sea of buried lives,
the rooks inhabit headstones and watch
as you reach that spot where you wait for me.
I suggest we visit the Irish Famine Memorial,
you lot worry you’ll be late.
As we file out the side gate, pause
for a break in the traffic, to cross over,
the coffin of our family unit becomes
almost too heavy for me to bear.
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Rebecca Gethin: I called her Uncle Sandy from Champion the Wonder Horse No one to ask now what she was really like: brown permed hair, clumpy shoes. Tall. Thin as a strict word: she seemed old, staid. I wonder if she’d lost someone – the war had only ended ten years earlier. Perhaps that’s why she took the job, looking after me. I can’t have been easy: prone to tempers, night frights, faddy about food, sometimes rude. The survivor, I was spoilt rotten, as everyone kept telling me. My Daddy won’t marry you, I told her. She was dutiful. Meals on time; washing, ironing; cleaned the house, polished the silver. I never thanked her, never felt grateful. My friend and I threw her jam sandwiches over the wall. I hated mealtimes. Her food made me gag - fish pie, semolina. When my father got engaged to a young, pretty woman Uncle Sandy called the sheets disgusting. Upped, left. Abandoned, I scribbled hate notes to her on the wall, in indelible black felt tip.
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Stephen Bone: Net Curtains Their net curtains, each other Monday, she'd take down. To be plunged with hands encased in latex gloves – hospital grade – into the Belfast frothed with Daz, a dash of bleach and left to soak, until hygienic as a Swiss clinic. A rinse of running cold, then pegged out to dry, before rehung to whitewash the dirty linen of their lives.
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Jeff Skinner: Friday Our lady of the aisles, I bring you these gifts – anchovies bread the fine Italian oil olives (Greek) a bar of dark chocolate that’s good for the heart Each week we chew the fat, confide, once in a while, spill the beans. For some of us it’s a lifeline, you observe, kindness changing hands – wine milk red and green apples My card hovers out there, above and beyond the machine, seeking approval – queuing couples mutter, their trolleys overflowing like Christmas. Now you offer the ribboning receipt, a free smile.
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Cos Michael: Reading the smallprint I spend my life on an escalator trying to read passing posters confused at whether it is best to lean back and finish what's past or forward, grabbing a preview in the futile hope that as I trip to the top I might have absorbed at least one whole message
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Neil Douglas: No onions
Three strangers, one with a barbed wire tattoo, walk into a kebab shop, High
Road, Lewisham.It’s Good Friday 2020. Black Cherry in bloom, sky blue, air clean
and people say they can hear birds instead of planes at daybreak. Three
strangers, one with a barbed wire tattoo, in a kebab shop. Three men unmasked,
ungloved, all standing adjacent. One man turns to another man, and he is close
enough to whisper something in his ear. Right in his ear. This man laughs and
touches the third man on the elbow. Touches him on the elbow. And the third
man, the one with the barbed wire tattoo, turns to Ali who is slicing his doner on
the rotisserie and says no onions.
Blue sky, blackbird song,
a barbed wire tattoo; fallen
blossom melts like snow.
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Gareth Adams: Evening Stroll Walking along the pavement At night, in town, alone You are lit by four lampposts Maybe more. Different versions of you Split and merge in rhythm At angles along the pavement As you pass. The lights play tag With shadows of your self Until you begin to wonder Which one’s real. What if one should slip away When the light’s not looking, Race you home, bolt the door Lock you out? Would you wander through The spaces between The ticking of the clock. To try the door?
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Katharine James: Exhibition In a photograph from Hiroshima a man’s shadow rests on a wall. But there isn’t a man there to cast it. It isn’t a shadow at all.
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Özge Lena: Portal Three steps backward, two shadows on the snow, one smaller. The black hole of the barrel is a portal to a parallel world where children in dark blue uniforms march as they chant a loud anthem of valour. Three steps forward, two shadows on the snow, one smaller, hands up. Frozen time on the spilt honey of a street lamp, the sound of the drill on ice, an exploded hideout. Three steps backward, two shadows on the snow, one smaller. Sudden crows lift off with a single shot that rips the frostbitten air. Three steps forward, two shadows on the snow, one smaller, the one that is collapsing down.
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Ken Cockburn: Ballad After torching the castle he has returned, penitent. The lady speaks leniency too soon for his liking and to demonstrate the depths of his remorse he lays his head on the block. Turning she nods sharply.
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John Whitehouse: There will be blood https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68895233 Cavalry horses Vida, Quaker, Trojan and Tennyson, bolted one April morning, striking cars in central London. The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, riderless loose on the street, blood-smeared from breastbone to bridle. Big Ben chimed a false hour. A sign to break free, acting out their metaphors, red-eyed, sweating, snorting. The animals get it, when there is something wrong with the world. They prick up their ears to a shift in time and seasons. The ground has slipped from under us. A general subsidence alters the lie of the land. Even the stars are crooked. Since we have chosen our leaders, portents hover in the fugitive sky. A white horse, a black horse, a red horse, a pale horse. Time to harvest red grapes from the earth. Pressed wine mutatesinto rivers of blood, rising to the horses bridles. John Whitehouse: The big tree Even now, the big sycamore tree is growing, seeds spiralling in the blue, like helicopters, missions for the children, playing in the Autumn light. Double decker buses come and go like clocks, collecting their blessings. Pre- selector gearbox, the logos of London Transport painted out. Everyone knows the Big Tree. A mark in the landscape, a destination in old money, beyond time, cardboard tickets, red and green, a hushed witness. The driver throws a cigarette, trailing to earth, he sweeps up, like a matador, into the high cab, flicks the ignition switch, and some part of him yearns for loneliness. Swearing under his breath, over an unnamed tragedy, the conductor stamps his foot upstairs, frightening the passengers. He swings the ticket machine as a murder weapon. Under the shelter of the big tree, boys wheel their useless prizes. Black Jaguars, smelling of stagecoaches, walnut, and thick leather, the odour of Sweet Afton Banks. A Humber Snipe jousted me off my bike. My father felt it, through the sighing of the tree. He ran to me, expecting to find me dead: My son Absalom, my son Absalom! Foolish Absalom, misled by Ahitophel, joined in battle with his father. Unhorsed by a low- hanging fork in Ephraim’s wood. Slain, for David to mourn. The rumours of trees, bear witness to our wrongs and rights. Zacchaeus, a known rascal, climbed the Sycamore tree to see Jesus. Beyond hope, yet finding something.
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Colin Pink: Heading South Mosab left Jabalia with death on his shoulder, like a small child riding on their father death clutched at his hair, the better to hang on, he walked south, he walked and he walked, soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint, stripped him and beat him but no one noticed death sitting on his shoulder… later he began to walk south again, with death still riding on his shoulder, and as he walked death got heavier and heavier, pressing down, what had started out light as a small child had now become as heavy as a grown man, he wondered when he’d be able to put it down Mosab Abu Toha was awarded the Pulitzer prize for essays on suffering of Palestinians in Gaza
Back to poet list... Forward to next poet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ***
Vanessa Ackerman : Poems for Hagar 1. On the holiest day of the year I look at God square in the eyes and roll an olive under my tongue after all He didn’t hear Sarah, not Sarah and not Hagar and the olive is the knot the doctor tied in my womb fire, fire when they took you from me for the rest of your life you kept repeating, it was too soon, the long sound of dust, interrupted 2. I count four walls in my silence Brushing your wet hair is one The slope of a dream A slope to nothing, to a gentle thought And the wordless songs I sing is another And everyday I am preparing you for mourning Yes that’s what I am doing Here are your prayers Here are your cut out memories And don’t forget my bones And the heat and the sand Where you will find all my loves Huddled together Like an old woman in rags waiting for water 3. I wasn’t wed to anyone a black hole maybe, a door to a universe in which whole cities collapsed the rubble and the debris yes, that was my groom and at my wedding I drowned like a widow and now when the waters rise in my dreams I am not frantic, I simply clutch my passport see, this is victory
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Sue Rose: HEH (hay)
Behold the breath, its birth at the back of the tongue, dark opening to the light at the seat of swallowing. This is spirit, soul, sigh, exhaled in the warmth of air, cloud on mirror. Praise its huff before the last gasp at the end of words when it serves as a mother of reading. Hey, they say, hallel, hallelujah for Hashem, The Name, the creator of light in an outbreath. This is the high five of the body—fingers, senses, dimensions— this is the the, the ha that deals in specifics, the spark, the halation that wakes the wonder. . Sue Rose: MEM (mem)
Forty, as in the days and nights of flood, mem, king over water, brings cold in the year, belly in the soul, earth in the universe. One of the elemental mothers— mem, aleph, shin: air, fire, water—primordial mem keeps mum, clamp of lips at teat, a murmur of mam, mummy, am, immi, names like mementos recalling the mmm of comfort and home. Open as the half moon of a breaker that looms at the horizon, it’s used in the middle or to start: emet, truth, mikvah, bath of rebirth. At the end of words, it’s closed as the womb, rachem, ministering the mitzvah of umbilical manna for forty weeks, before the gush and muscle of metamorphosis from the body’s muffle. .
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Vanessa Ackerman is an actor, writer and educator based in Cambridge,UK. She has written five full length plays and her poems have appeared in publications such as Propel, Marble Poetry, Icarus, Cephalo Press, Tears in the Fence, and Anthropocene amongst others. Her poem Antigone was a 2024 Best of the Net Nominee.Her collection Small Rebellions was a winner of the 2023 Dreich Classic Chapbook Competition.
Gareth Adams lives in the UK. he has returned to writing after a long hiatus.
Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, on the North Somerset coast. His three collections to date are Communing (Indigo Dreams, 2016), We Are All Lucky (Indigo Dreams, 2018) and Hi-Viz (Yaffle Press, 2021). He edits Black Nore Review (https://blacknorereview.wordpress.com). Website: https://benbanyard.wordpress.com
John Bartlett is the author of twelve books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge poetry prize and his latest poetry pamphlet is In The Spaces Between Stars Lie Shadows (walleahppress). he lives In Southern Australia.
Joseph Blythe is from the north of England. He has short story and poetry publications present or forthcoming from Stand, Pennine Platform, Grist Books, Astrea, SwimPress, Allegro Poetry and more. From 2022-2024, he served as an editor at Grist Books. He is currently working on a novel about the fallibility of memory for his PhD. He holds an undergraduate degree in English Literature with Creative Writing and a Master’s in Creative Writing. He tweets, Instagrams, and Blueskys @wooperark.
Stephen Bone’s most recent poems have appeared in Black Nore Review, Snakeskin and The Spectator. A new edition of his first collection, In The Cinema (Playdead Press 2014 ) is due in 2025.
Dan Burns is a writer living in Sheffield. His work has previously appeared in Prole Books, Pulsar, The Dawntreader, and Snakeskin Poetry. In his spare time, he is a teacher.
Michael Carrino is a retired English lecturer at the State University College at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was co-founder/poetry editor of theSaranac Review. Publications include ten books of poetry, the most recent Natural Light (Kelsay Books), and The Scent of Some Lost Pleasure (Conestoga Zen 3 Anthology).
Graham Clifford is a British author of five collections of poetry. His work has been chiselled into paving slabs, translated into Romanian and German, can be found on the Poetry Archive, and is anthologised by publishers including Faber and Broken Sleep Books. Most recently his work has been included on Iamb and BerlinLit. www.grahamcliffordpoetry.com
Ken Cockburn is a poet and translator based in Edinburgh. He runs Edinburgh Poetry Tours, guided walks with readings of poems in the city’s Old Town. His most recent pamphlet is Edinburgh: poems & translations (2021). https://kencockburn.co.uk
Lewis Wyn Davies is emerging poet from Shropshire whose work has been published by Poetry Wales, The Pomegranate London, Dreich and Culture Matters, while he has also appeared in anthologies with Broken Sleep Books and Sunday Mornings at the River.
Tony Dawson is an English writer living in Seville. He has published widely in the UK, the USA and Australia. He has three small collections of poetry:Afterthoughts ISBN 9788119 228348, Musings ISBN 97819115 819666 and Reflections in a Dirty Mirror ISBN 9781915819949 as well as a selection of flash fiction, Curiouser and Curiouser ISBN 9788119 654932.
Alexis Deese-Smith is an emerging writer interested in navigating neurodivergence by building fractured spaces in which her autistic self might feel at home. Originally from the sunny state of South Carolina, she moved to the UK in 2023 in order to pursue poetry education and a gluttonous amount of cream teas. Most recently, she was chosen as a runner-up for The Classical Association’s inaugural poetry competition, listed as an Honorable Mention by Plentitutude’s 2025 Prizes in Nonfiction, and shortlisted for The Poetry Society Free Verse 2025 competition.
Neil Douglas worked as a doctor in London’s East End and graduated with an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College in 2024. He is published in anthologies and magazines in the UK, North America and Hong Kong.
Angela France has had poems published in many leading journals and has been anthologised a number of times, her fifth collection Terminarchy came out in 2021. Angela teaches creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in community settings. She leads the longest running reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’.
Jeff Gallagher is from Sussex, UK. His poems have featured in publications including Rialto, Eat The Storms, Acumen, The High Window and The Journal. He has been a teacher of English and Latin. He also appeared in an Oscar-winning movie.
Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications and 2 novels. She was a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Her poems are widely published in various magazines and anthologies and she won the first Coast to Coast pamphlet competition with Messages.
Philip Gross has published nearly 30 collections in 40 years of publication, the latest, The Shores of Vaikus (Bloodaxe, 2024). He won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009, a Cholmondeley Award in 2017, and is a keen collaborator across arts
Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and writes short stories and poetry. She has been widely published in web magazines and in print anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Scrambled Lives on Buttered Toast was published in 2024. She practices as a participatory arts facilitator, and believes everyone’s voice counts.
Norton Hodges is a poet. He lives in Lincoln.
Barbara Howerska is a Bradford poet, with two books published by Half Moon Press ; After the raging 2018 and The Widow Witch , 2019. She has done solo poetry shows at the IIkley Literature Fringe Festival and ran a spoken word night, in Bradford, which was featured on Radio 4.
Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth, Devon. Widely published, she has won many awards, including commended in the Troubadour Competition, 2024 and the National, 2022. Her latest collection is Love Leans Over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). www.rosiejackson.org.uk
Ross Jackson is a retired teacher resident in Perth, Western Australia. Ross has had poems in many journals and poetry websites. A collection, Time alone on a quiet path came out in 2020 (UWAP). His latest collection is Suited to Grey (WA Poets Press)
A poem by Bridgette James was shortlisted for the Bridport in 2024. Another poem of hers won the Flash Fiction Summer Poetry Competition, 2024.
Dan Janoff: is a member of the Forest Poets stanza in Walthamstow since 2022, Dan writes poetry and short stories. He won the 2023 King Lear Poetry Prize in the beginner category and was Highly Commended in the Indigo First Collection Competition 2024.
Pam Job lives in Essex where she enjoys being part of a thriving creative community. She is widely published in magazines and has co-edited several poetry anthologies. In 2024, she won second place in The Frogmore Press poetry competition and was shortlisted in a seven further poetry competitions. She likes the adrenalin rush of sending poems off to be judged!
Katharine is a writer, theatre-maker and performer. She grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire and lives in East London.
Özge Lena’s poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Cambridge Poetry, The Trumpeter, The Gentian, The International Times, and elsewhere in various countries, including the USA, UK, Canada, Singapore, Spain, Iceland, Serbia, France, etc. Özge’s poetry was nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize in 2021, then for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023, and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024. Her ecopoem “Undertaker” is forthcoming in the Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War Anthology of Scarlet Tanager Books in the USA. Also, her poem “Here is a New Heart For You” was featured in the storefront of the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Dublin, California, for the National Poetry Month 2024.
Helen McSherry is a Belfast poet living in Cardiff. Recently, her poems have been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize, awarded 2ndplace in the Hammond House Prize, and have appeared in Poetry Wales, Cambridge Poetry Magazine and An Áitúil. Helen facilitates writing-for-wellbeing groups and was selected for the 2024 Literature Wales Writing Well Programme.
Cos Michael writes about life from an autistic perspective, sometimes referencing a turbulent childhood. Cos is a Londoner and has worked across the arts and charities sectors. She has had poems published by The Alchemy Spoon, The Ekphrastic Review, Wildfire Words, Atrium and Grindstone
Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct literary magazines and websites and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears and Poetry Scotland that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Scotland with his wife and, whenever the mood takes him, next door’s cat. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels: Jim, not the cat.
Sue Norton has been published in various magazines and anthologies.
Colin Pink co-chairs the Barnes & Chiswick Poetry Stanza. His poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and four collections, most recently Typicity and Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy.
Sue Rose has published three full-length collections with Cinnamon Press, a chapbook of sonnets paired with her own photos, and a book of tree photos and poems with photographer, Lawrence Impey. Her fourth collection will be out from Cinnamon Press in the summer
Andrew Sclater is a prize-winning poet from Scotland, now living in Paris. His new chapbook is forthcoming with Mariscat Press. He speaks three languages and translates poetry and prose. Formerly a plant scientist, landscape historian, teacher, and editor of Charles Darwin’s correspondence, he co-founded the National Botanic Garden of Wales.
Jeff Skinner’s poems have been published in anthologies and journals, most recently in Poetry News, Paperboats; Ink, Sweat and Tears. He was commended in the last Sonnet or Not competition. He volunteers at his local food bank and in an Oxfam bookshop, listens to music, watches football, reads, writes.
Peter Surkov’s poems have appeared in magazines including The Rialto, Magma, Poetry Scotland, and Stand. He is working on his first collection.
Sam Szanto is an award-winning, Pushcart prize-nominated writer. Her poetry pamphlet This Was Your Mother was published by Dreich Press in 2024; another pamphlet, Splashing Pink’(with Annie Cowell), was published by Hedgehog Press.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad has had three pamphlets published: Once There Was Colour (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds’ , a collaboration with artist Sula Rubens (Clayhanger Press, 2023) and A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Website
John Whitehouse has had work published in: Stand, Acumen, and London Grip. His two collections are A Distant Englishness, (Clayhanger Press) and After a Short Illness, (Broken Sleep 2026).
Phil Wood lives in Wales. He has worked in education, statistics, shipping and a biscuit factory. His interests include learning German, painting with watercolours, and, of course, reading poetry
Pam Zinnemann-Hope has two full collections: On Cigarette Papers, adapted by her as a play on Radio 4, & Foothold. She is also children’s author
Poem ‘The Strange Serenity of a Train Platform on a Winter’s Night’ featured on London Grip – Joseph Blythe
29/08/2025 @ 16:30
[…] I’d longed to get my work into London Grip New Poetry for a while, so I was over the moon when my poem ‘The Strange Serenity of a Train Platform on a Winter’s Night’ was accepted. Read it (and the rest of the issue) here […]