Editor's Comments
Welcome to the first edition of Allegro for 2021. Needless to say the last twelve months have been extremely difficult for all of us. Unsurprisingly several poets submitting this time wrote about the pandemic and the best of these are to be found in this issue. Perhaps surprisingly many more people have submitted to Allegro over the past two issues than in the past. That has made my job as editor difficult: how to decide which poems from a very strong field will make it when there is limited space. I hope you enjoy my final selection.
Sally Long
Poems
Entry Wounds
A recurring dream can be lunar
in phase & candlepower, or
a downcast gleam like the stage
of a rocket falling away.
In the deep-set jurisdictions
of REM I hear, as command
& refrain, ‘Under Over,’ which is followed by a plaintive wheeze
like a field organ signing off
on entry wounds.
When I was a readable puzzle
of bones and scars, I’d feign
happiness on waking. I was
eight or nine, when the sky,
at night, should have been
infinite and filled with pilot
lights, spirit level bubbles
and cones of tapering brass
on green string, not fish hooks
and filleting knives. I’d look up
and away as a satellite
blinked over like a trail
of luminal on black velvet.
I’d stand in the hacked furrow
my heels made as I reared
from sleeplessness, my blood
sounding like a tour guide
winging it through a half-
rhymed version of Rapunzel.
Anthony Lawrence
Viol Da Gamba Lesson
Viola perches like a waisted owl,
pretty in her tawny wood and purfling.
Tentatively I try to make her sing -
she answers me with screeches, hoots and howls.
Like a falconer, I hood and starve her.
In the dark she creaks, untested, patient.
Finally when I think she might relent
I bow before her, begin the torture.
With rosined tail hair from Russian ponies
I carefully approach her underhand
and stroke her in a way she might withstand...
to no success - she merely squeaks at me:
I’m not some simple strummable guitar:
I’m your mistress - learn here how flawed you are.
Marc Woodward
Concerning the burial of Elizabeth in woollen cloth in 1695 *
No corpse of any person shall, except
For those who die of plague, be
buried in
a shirt, a shift, a sheet or shroud
or any other thing
made or mingled with flax, or hemp or
silk or hair
or gold or silver or any other stuff
or thing,
other than that made of sheep’s wool
only.
On pain of forfeiting five pounds
as mentioned hereinafter
Dear Sister, do not
lay my soul to rest
in woollen shrouds
as now the law requires.
I beg you, Emma,
honour my request
to meet my Maker as
my heart desires.
My lace trimmed
gown our father gave to me
would serve to
clothe me through eternity.
I certify hereby that Emma
Hollinhurst
of Rugeley parish did this day,
affirm on oath that Elizabeth Cuting,
her sister late deceased,
was buried in a linen shroud,
contrary to the Act for burial in
wool.
The informer having thus been paid,
according to the law,
a sum of fifty shillings from the
levied sum.
Elizabeth, I buried
in her gown,
for she could set
aside the parish fine.
Since I have little
wealth that is my own,
then must a shroud
of poverty be mine?
For fifty pieces
means I could afford
a finer gown than
hers, to meet our Lord.
* Responding to the tombs of Elizabeth Cuting and her sister Emma at St Augustine’s Church Rugeley, Staffordshire
Roger Bloor
Irritated Muse
My muse is angered by my Covid cares -
“You worry if the shops have food and beer,
and what a Zoom attendee rightly wears!
You’re just as mortal as you were last year,
and wrote of life and death, sickness and health.
Well, now’s an actual existential crisis!
Think family and friends, the world, your self...
forget the shopping and the product prices!
You’ll die; the question’s When. The only tool
for immortality is me, that clear?
You should be writing poetry, you fool!
This is your chance. Focus on me.” (Yes, dear.)
“Respect me as your muse: I’m not your shill.
If you can’t write a poem, write your will.”
Robin Helweg-Larsen
For he who tolls the bell
Taught the ropes long ago, he’s older, more solid
the ease of those years pulls a single bell
in a booming come-hither.
I am in Durham again at evensong,
crammed into the cathedral’s nave. My knees ache
not with any urgency to pray
but from the crush of bewildered tourists,
the faithful congregation and those who, like me,
relish plainsong and chant.
He heaves once again
and the bell’s tongue rattles
rooks from the trees, cracks laughter
from every gargoyle and mason-carved devil
crouched on the roof.
Neatly rolled sleeves bunch their muscles,
face tilted, reddening, a patina of sweat,
the whole of him wraps around
one long, final swing.
David Harmer
Abandoned
“He shall not feed on either earth or pelf, but upon wisdom, and on love and virtue.” ― Divine Comedy Inferno Canto 1
too soon they
learn
how a hare
will swerve and turn
and none will bet
on something certain
now become a burden
a racing certainty
a liability
*
the buzz of
fretting flies
something lies
behind the fence
a cage of ribs
a bed in weeds
that prick
a sore
open
the gate gapes
too late, though,
to run
for escape
found, it
comes quietly
silently
while brittle insects
scream at the sun
Dantesque the
scene
yet it will give love
soon,
this veltro,
the gift of
agape
known, it seems, to
Dante.
Glenn Hubbard
Faux Beau
Beware the man who wears a watch not set
to tell the time. He probably keeps books,
arranged on shelves, which he has never read,
and spices, racked, which he has never used.
He likely orders in, at company
expense, for lunch, for dinner also, but
goes out when opportunity presents
itself. Well-dressed, well-spoken, on the make
and for the take, he does a decent show,
until someone with substance notices
the pretense of it all, then sends him on
his way. He goes, with what he thinks is style,
yet all the while he still remains a sham,
as he confesses to the air, “I am.”
Jane Blanchard
Carving
I cut my name into a maple tree
on Ella Street, 1975,
its full coordinates in memory.
It shone for days in white wood,
as if inscribed in the Book of Life.
Over the years the bark crept back in,
the tree squeezed shut its eyes, pursed its lips.
My name became a lizard.
The tree swallowed the vowels
and left behind only a ssssss..., warning.
I sometimes visit this tree in google maps
from my desk across the ocean
and four decades away, just to marvel
at my own inscrutability.
Filakto
(a Greek word referring to something that keeps you safe by chasing away evil. A small religious cloth pouch)
Stitches still clutch tightly to
the yellowed cloth,
this tiny parcel never to be
opened.
You show us with a mixture of
amusement
and something deeper, laugh at
old superstitions
but underneath memories rise
so clearly I can almost see
them.
You come alive, like you did when
we found
the house in Kifissia. You told me
how much the street
had changed,
and when we went to
Papou’s grave
you were so certain
you'd remember
immediately where
it was, surprised
when we had to
search between the rows
of pale stone,
bright under vivid sun.
Wearing your coat
despite the heat, your shoulders
sinking at the
sight of cans and wrappers
disturbing the
quiet ground. There's no one left
in the country to
care for the place now. But then
later you were
singing in the restaurant
on Mitropoleus
street, singing along to the music.
You hadn’t forgotten a word.
Sophia Argyris
Forty-eight hours
Once, that was all they gave
you.
Everything that could be, had
been done.
Not being there, you won't
remember,
Pin-eyed and foetal again, you'd
already
left the derelict building of
yourself and
boarded up the windows, no
further
repairs being possible or
appropriate.
It was down to us to keep watch
over the
hourglass, observe how its
individual grains
at last became countable, almost
nameable;
how time - in the end - becomes
the thief.
But miracles occur. Or perhaps
the body
simply remembers itself, the way
trees
do through a winter's bruising
darkness?
I see you now – defiant, alive,
forgetful –
and rehearse, in spite of myself,
being there
once again; those solemn faces
delivering
difficult news in a quiet room,
the blinds
discreetly drawn. Will grief wear
a different
disguise next time? Or will the
sand just
drizzle away to the clock's laboured
ticking?
Robert Ford
Two Figures, Distant
He
classifies themselves travellers, not tourists who irritate him, knows, this
thought suppressed, she loves normality, would prefer to settle, work, but he
thrills to romantic readiness for adventure. Paying homage to history’s
cause and effect, he can’t know he shall cherish these days while she continues
in the rowdy present, dubious about time wasted reminiscing.
Norwegian
Customs inspection reveals his family tree he researches, dark ink patterning
scrolled art paper. Suspicious, they lay bare the battered
kangaroo-decorated van for contraband to match scruffy appearance, baffled by
his drug of choice: back stories motivating this calligraphy. Honesty
apparent in her clear eyes, hardened officials sigh, wave them through.
Inside
their thin tent in a meadow near signposted Viking graves where he pictures
longboats, ritual savagery, they sleep, two spoons. Drinking summer’s
airy morning light, he crawls outside to start the day, realises tilted time
this far north is only 3 a.m., tunes into the difference, the wonder of this.
Later,
before they cross another border into Sweden’s scented pine forests, she fires
up their meths stove, rinses smalls. They see a cow grazing a green roof,
drive through long tunnels bearing the weight of massive mountains, walls
dripping wet, her, careful at the wheel, him, the voluble dreamy navigator
voyaging over a magical landscape, surrendering their days to distant memories.
Breaking
the surface
do gannets see ghostly wrecks
haunt fjords’ silence?
Ian C Smith
Letters from the bank
We are contacting you about your account
it has come to our notice you are overdrawn
according to our records this is unauthorised
please get in touch at the earliest opportunity
till then the bank will charge you daily
we await your call with interest.
The smooth running of the bank is our interest
we don't want to suspend your current account
but we have to take this kind of action daily
the danger to us cannot be overdrawn
when people use every opportunity
to take risks that are unauthorised.
I once spent time that was unauthorised
pursued a person - I had an interest
bought them gifts every opportunity
put everything on my personal account
the misery I felt can’t be overdrawn
I regret the shame and humiliation daily
If you don’t clear this debt I will call you daily
I have means at my disposal unauthorised
to recover the money overdrawn
the bank’s reputation is my interest
pain caused you is not taken into account
I could make all this go away given the opportunity.
To meet you for coffee is an opportunity
that I hope I wish and I pray for daily
I have feelings for you
take them into account
what I said is highly unauthorised
say nothing of this for our interest
the risk I have taken can’t be overdrawn.
My memories of you will be overdrawn
at the earliest opportunity
to forget you is in my interest
I will no longer think of you daily
the feelings I have for you are unauthorised
I’ll erase our correspondence from this account.
I will not be contacting
you about your account
I don’t care if my action is unauthorised
but the bank will charge you daily.
Marius Grose
May
The dawn’s already warm, from
yesterday.
Beside the path, a thousand bees
insist
on lifting every final pollen
grain,
may blossom transforms hedges
into drifts,
while mayweed, bruised by boots,
perfumes the breeze,
and foxgloves start to hint at
the colours they’ll show.
Back home, our roses promise
perfect leaves,
but a gap reveals where one no
longer grows.
The patient tapestry of song
falls still –
birds rise and chase a sparrow
hawk away.
When they resume, their voices
remain shrill,
in quarrel with a low propeller
plane.
Is any month more beautiful than
May –
or more disquieting? I
hear you say.
Phil Vernon
Plane
Tree
Each leaf an elegy, a mournful cry on the wind,
a downgoing song, a descant of declining gold.
It is on the cusp of bronze that the leaf’s sadness blooms,
surpassing the roses in the final beauty of death.
Let us sing hymns to summer’s ghosts, her departing beauties
soon to be cast in traces of lace and cobwebs,
because this is the month of exhaustion, the days of leave-taking,
when the plane trees assent to shadow our moods.
Never more fragile, the autumn leaf is leaning
to the edge of being, speaking in tones of going,
but the leaf hangs on the branch, still in its green irony
while we trace our own dying in its short veins.
James Dowthwaite
Take Your Pick
I was a) Poor- Mite
b) Spoilt-Brat
c) Muck-Underfoot
d) Brass-Bold
Then a)Keeper of Secrets
b) Artless Dodger
c) Friend to All
d) No-one’s Friend
Afterwards a)Rebel-Teacher
b) Downfall-Woman
c) No-Trust-Just-Might
d) Water-Treadler
Now, it’s a) Word-Knitter
b) Politics- Gloomer
c) Crone-Swimmer
d) Garden-Wilder
Rebecca Gethin
My father builds another wall
How long can he stand the strong
June heat
at the top of the garden? His
five parts sand
to one cement were once the best
on the street.
How he stands now though,
straining. The stretcher bonds
don’t understand
how each brick vertebrae sits
less neatly
than he’d like, or what the
design plans say.
I take out a builder’s tea, admit
defeat
when it goes untouched, his dry
rust hand
at the flaking grout of a knee
joint.
But for now, he goes on standing.
John Rogers
A Quiver of Cobras
I guessed right on the trivia
quiz:
A group of cobras is a quiver. A
quiver is
a shiver, shake, or shudder. I’ve
never
seen a group of cobras. I’ve
never seen
a cobra. Perhaps they quiver. I
think
I might quiver, shake or shudder
in the presence of a cobra.
A quiver is also a holder of
arrows.
Arrows and cobras—both
deadly if encountered. Both
peaceful if emptied of all
aggression. I know I would not
shudder
gazing at a sleeping cobra or an
arrow
fallen in the grass.
Judy Clarence
Great Uncle Ernie
The Manse
Giffnock
June 1936
he’d sit in his study
retailing Presbyterian
morality
& keeping
an eye on the pedigree
Labrador puppies
he was rearing
to make ends meet.
Carefully
he constructed a
pen of wire netting to
keep them in.
Occasionally
they’d escape, then
he’d jump up from
his moral tracts and
rush swearing down
the Garden path &
beat the little beasts
back within the Pale.
In sepia tints he stands
still smiling —
tall, bronzed, blond & very
attractive to women.
Think how much worse
I’d be, June, if I
weren’t a minister, in
the bosom of the family.
Great Uncle Ernie wrote
sermons for children —
when she was fourteen
he nearly raped my mother.
Helen May Williams
Working 2020
For Claire Bartram
We come to a stop
on the tarmac
of the Park and Ride,
tripping opposite ways.
Blue! For a moment
she registers sound –
I see she hasn’t
recognised the name
(her tea and cake name
that’s gardens in summer,
not the Dear - Best wishes,
formal email name).
There’s time for words, but not
enough to recalculate distance or do
ridiculous things with our elbows.
Already the bus is grinding its teeth.
I will sit at the top like a masthead
and munch my own breath.
I have extracts from Wuthering Heights
last handled on Friday, for handing out
with gloves (though I briefly considered
a superfluous clothes peg), so
they can annotate the margins
in Cathy mode – damn…
I’ve forgotten to ask how this feels.
Or to talk about the woman
in Fenwick’s window, crawling
past an unmasked mannequin.
And I’m not sure why
that was funny any more.
Carolyn Oulton
Razing the Stakes
A gold coin flickers its worth
in reflections between branches—
washing across the windows
of the bus that carries me
home towards this glimmering sun.
Looking down at the grazing
sheep; owned and spray-painted,
marked by another copper coin.
The sheep have long forgotten,
unaware of the stain that claims.
Through wide front seat windows
piercing the narrow country lanes
I see a chandelier of wasps
glow and twinkle in amber light,
making their home in a gazebo
of arched boughs, directly on course
for tragedy I await their response.
So smoothly they slipstream, evading
by inches the shattering of lives—and the bus
continues on in its claim for space.
Sean Chapman
this certainty
nineteen crows fly over - eerily
silent -
as the fire rages to the south
some of the few remaining birds,
they are heading to their
roosting area early,
somewhere beyond the clearcut to
the north -
hardy, year-round residents,
sticking it out for the long haul
we stand with masks on
in ashfall that settles in layers
like dirty snow
on packed cars ready for
evacuation,
on trees, roses, woodpiles and
buildings,
everything transformed to
grayscale
as mid-afternoon poses as dusk,
what I thought was a cinder -
but darker, larger -
lands on my leg, then flutters
off
a wood nymph butterfly
looking for nectar -
wild marjoram, butterfly bush,
or a piece of rotting fruit -
her only compass
is the certainty of survival
that emerged with her from the
chrysalis -
and sends her dusty wings into
this half light
Barbara Parchim
Coming Down
The full Moon up all night,
yellow-faced, like a light left on
at a party with all asleep,
hangs in its descent now
in the clear dawning sky, above
the knife-edge of the iced roof.
I slit the blinds, timid, an aged
neighbour
to observe its restless, solitary act;
preserving
faintly, all the jaundiced fire of youth.
John McKeown
Trecco
Bay
When rainy days in caravans were holidays,
I'd lie awake for gulls to land; that thud of feet
on roof, those rusted voices, beaks to quickly fray
a fishy eye. I sank beneath the cotton sheet
and heard the whoosh of wings and tasted salted air.
I dreamt a feathered God. I mouthed a pagan prayer.
Phil Wood
The arrival
The trunk sways like a coffin
down the corridors. I hover behind it,
my parents heave it up the stairs,
drop it onto the dormitory floor.
It is a crater between us.
Retracing our steps, I see them off
at the school entrance – turn back
to unpack my loss, stuff it into drawers
under my allotted bed, hang it limp
in the dark of communal wardrobes.
That night I lie in a row of girls
with no walls on either side to stop me
from falling
Hélène Demetriades
Some things he won’t say
How the woodsmoke of stoves
on a chilly morning catches
in cobwebs of fog
fluffing redwood and fir
to be split by hawks
or stirred by swarming crows,
then shattered by blue jays
who scold, who disapprove of
silence,
who in fact disapprove of him, her,
everything.
How she would thrill to the call of
thrush
like folksongs of the forest
and she would squeeze his hand a
little tighter
sharing the delight. No need to
say
but he’s sure somehow she’s near,
she’s watching.
Joe Cottonwood
November V
The day is beautiful, cold and
clear.
Painfully
beautiful.
Like that girl from seventh grade
So
distant, mysterious.
But the day is here
And
available
Kind
but cold
Clear
but distant.
Marc Janssen
Filemot
Filemot; the colour of dead leaves,
also spelt folimort, or fuil-de-mort.
But autumn leaves die in so many shades,
the yellow fades of birch, the paler willow,
fillamort, philiamort, foliomort,
matt tans of oak, the shining golds of beech,
philomot, fieulamot, phyllamort,
the blood-red deaths of ornamental maples,
so many ways of dying. Just the one
cold truth of being dead. French feuillemorte.
Mark Totterdell
Naming the Magpie Collective
‘A conventicle’ seems wrong for the
collective:
the elision of convent and canticle
has too much religious resonance
for the raucous squawks of this
congregation –
some thirty magpies in the crown of a
plane.
They’re said to be ‘a mischief’ but,
just rackety,
are more a crowd of football fans
than thieves.
‘A chattering’? That’s for jackdaws
and, anyway,
it doesn’t fit the yacketing rattling
down the street.
‘A tittering’? Like ‘chattering’,
insufficient noise
and far from catching the cacophony
of caws.
Something more like bedlam might be
preferred –
let’s say ‘a parliament’. Though used
for rooks,
it fits well the discordances of PMQs
where members, egging on their sides,
yatter derision across the
parliamentary divide.
PMQs: Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK Parliament
Mantz Yorke
Lockdown
[Terza Rima Sonnet]
To live to hide another day,
I give up going to work – and gym –
And burrow down within the grey
Cold light of winter. Hope is slim
That I will get abroad this year.
The headlines on the news are grim,
The people that I pass show fear,
And, shrinking, try to move away,
If on the pavement I draw near.
Still, here we are and here we stay,
And wear our masks and wash our hands,
And hope to hide another day,
In shuttered homes throughout these lands.
And so, we wash and wash our hands.
Paula Aamli
I didn’t know what to make of it
when I saw Death walk down the high street
scythe tucked in elbow
a few bags on the arm –
there’s a job to do
but yknow
there’s also a clearance sale at Primark.
and there’s Time on the corner
with a cardboard sign
– will give you ten extra minutes
for booze –
and I’m not sure
but that might be Fear
busking by an open guitar case
with a handful of change
(that I’m pretty sure he put in there).
but it’s Chaos I remember,
it’s hard to forget,
because she’s screaming
at three men at once
red lipstick on her teeth
a half-full bottle of Merlot in one hand
and spitting on the feet
of passers-by.
Elizabeth Train-Brown
What they don’t tell you about friendship
is that you’ll grow used to hosting
sleepovers
for a family of furniture, whilst their
mother hula hoops the years,
unable to balance life’s offspring on
swinging hips.
You’ve been Godmother and Favourite
Aunt
to this limp bath mat sprawled beneath
your feet.
You squeeze its purple mohawk with your
toes,
ooze visions of toothbrush hakas
and prayer meetings, confessionals,
tears, hair and blood.
Mrs Kimono, a silken superstar
who once twirled Kabuki into the
kitchen,
waits to be cued from the back of the
door.
You squat on an unfamiliar toilet seat.
Downstairs,
cookies bake in a new double
oven,
a choir in Hitchin boasts a new
member.
You return to Seven Sisters,
pots and pans crave attention from the
drying rack.
There’s no point
learning their names.
Louise Goodfield
solar eclipse
its arrival is imminent!
atmospheric harbingers display
the signs
everyone is invited;
but some are left
out. others, partially invited.
glad we will get the full
package
it happens once in a blue
moon.
it will arrive in the
day and clad in a dark shiny
tuxedo. it will stand before the
limelight
and gift us a fleeting night
experience
at noon.
the limelight will beam on its
apparition
and transmit to us-- the invitees,
the mysterious shadow
of its dominion.
can't wait for the party to start!
Abdulrahman M. Abu-Yaman
Contributors
Paula Aamli is a Humanities graduate with a Masters in Sustainability. She is finalising her doctoral dissertation, "Working through Climate Grief”. Paula works in governance in financial services. Her greatest concern is the degraded condition in which human beings will hand over the Earth to future generations.
Abdulrahman M. Abu-Yaman writes poems from north-central of Nigeria. He has a major in Economics from IBB University, Lapai. He paints and draws calligraphy as an art enthusiast. His poem was a finalist in the Hysteria Writing Competition 2020. Reach him on twitter @abuu_yaman
Sophia Argyris was born in Belgium, to English and Greek parents. She spent much of her childhood in Scotland, and currently lives in Oxford. Her poetry has been published in various magazines, including The Agenda Broadsheet, Magma, Prole, Structo and Under the Radar. Her short collection was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2014.
Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia (USA). Her poetry has appeared previously in Allegro and recently in The French Literary Review, The Lyric, and The Seventh Quarry. Her fourth collection is In or Out of Season (2020).
Roger Bloor has an MA in Poetry Writing. He founded Clayhanger Press and is co-editor of The Alchemy Spoon poetry magazine. His work is published in Magma, Poetry London and a number of Anthologies. He was the winner of the 2019 Poetry London Clore Prize. www.roger bloor.co.uk
Sean Chapman is a British writer living in Cornwall beside the Atlantic and amongst the blur of a Whippet and a Labrador. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Marble Poetry, Raceme, Squawk Back, Prole, Dreich, The Pomegranate London, Fenland Poetry Journal, Quince, The Opiate and Anti-Heroin Chic.
Judy Clarence, a retired academic librarian, currently lives with her daughter, grandchildren, three cats and two dogs in the Sierra foothills after many years in Berkeley. She plays violin (baroque and modern) in several orchestras and chamber groups, sang in two classical choruses in pre-COVID days, and writes poetry constantly.
Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book of poetry is Random Saints.
Craig Coyle lives in Wishaw, and currently works as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner in Mental Health with NHS Lanarkshire. He has published in various magazines: Stand, Fire, Obsessed with Pipework, The English Chicago Review, Gutter, and Verse, and has work pending in Poetry Salzburg and Time Haiku. He was a mentee with the Clydebuilt Apprenticeship program in 2017. He has recently contributed to These Are The Hands, an anthology of poems celebrating the NHS, published by Fair Acre Press, proceeds from which go towards the Covid-19 emergency fund, and thereafter to NHS supported charities. His poem ‘The Drive Home’, selected from the anthology, was featured in The Guardian as Poem of the Month for April 2020.
Hélène Demetriades recently joint won the Hedgehog Press Full Fat Poetry Collection competition 2020, and will have her debut collection The Plumb Line published in 2022. Her poetry can be found in numerous magazines and webzines, including Allegro. She was highly commended by Patience Agbabi in Marsden The Poetry Village Competition 2019.
James Dowthwaite
teaches English literature at the University of Jena. His first book,
Ezra
Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language, was published in 2019. His
poetry is forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review and Acumen. He lives with his
wife and young son in Heidelberg.
Robert Ford's poetry has appeared in print and online publications in the UK, US and elsewhere, including Under the Radar, Brittle Star, Dime Show Review, The Interpreter's House and San Pedro River Review. More of his work can be found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/
Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications and has been a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Messages was a winner in the first Coast to Coast to Coast pamphlet competition. Vanishings has just been published by Palewell Press. She blogs at www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com
Louise Goodfield is a poet, writer & theatre-maker collecting stories from far-flung places via www.poetryvanlife.wordpress.com. Alumni of Apples & Snakes emerging writers program and recipient of an Arts Council England grant using poetry as a tool for social action and positive change. Her poems have been published in Lapidus International.
Marius Grose was born in 1957 in the city of Bath and had a career in broadcast television as a video editor. He began writing poetry in 2016 and has had poems published in the literary arts journal Dream Catcher and in the Ezine 192.
David Harmer was born in 1952 and lives in Doncaster. He is best known as a children's writer, with collections from Macmillans Children's Books and Frances Lincoln. He regularly reviews for Orbis and is once again seeing his work appear in poetry magazines.
Robin Helweg-Larsen's poems, largely formal, are widely published in the UK, US and Canada. Some favourites are in The HyperTexts. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low's Potcake Chapbooks - Form in Formless Times, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor's Harbour in the Bahamas.
Glenn Hubbard, a Londoner by birth, has lived in Madrid for over 30 years. He began writing in 2013 and has had over 80 poems published in magazines. He won this year's 40 Word Poem competition in the Bangor Literary Journal. He listens to W. S.Graham's ‘The Nightfishing’ obsessively.
Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. Regardless of that turmoil, his poetry can be found scattered around the world in places like Penumbra, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, the annual Salem Poetry Festival, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.
Anthony Lawrence’s poems have been published in, or are due to appear in, The Rialto, The Moth, Black Box Manifold, Magma, Poetry, as well as many journals in the US and Australia. He lives on Moreton Bay, Queensland.
John McKeown is a freelance arts journalist, a former theatre critic for the Irish Daily Mail and Irish Independent. He has three poetry collections in print: Night Walk (Salmon Press 2011), Sea of Leaves (Waterloo Press, 2009) and Looking Toward Inis Oirr (South Tipperary Arts 2003). He lives and works in Prague.
Carolyn Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is the project lead for https://kent-maps.online/ in collaboration with JSTOR Labs. Her most recent collection is Accidental Fruit (Worple).
Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon. She enjoys gardening, hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility. Her poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, Isacoustic, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall, Trouvaille Review and others. Her first chapbook, selected by Flowstone Press, will appear in 2021.
John Rogers studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University where he was awarded the Carcanet/PN Review Prize. He was published as part of the Critical Poetics’ Dial-a-Poem competition and has appeared in Ink, Sweat and Tears. He enjoys providing English tuition for secondary school students.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, cordite, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review ,Poetry Salzburg Review, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines in the UK and have occasionally won prizes. His collections are This Patter of Traces (Oversteps Books, 2014) and Mapping (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018).
Elizabeth Train-Brown, editor of Flash Literary Journal, won the 2020 Literary Lancashire Award and has been shortlisted in competitions by Creative Writing Ink, Voices, and Beyond Borders Scotland. Her work appears in Planet in Peril, Future of Text, Tastzine, Qutub Minar Review, Cake, Horla, Wax Poetry & Art, and Crossways.
Phil Vernon lives in Kent, in the UK. A micro pamphlet, This Quiet Shore, was published by Hedgehog Poetry in 2019, and a full collection Poetry After Auschwitz, by Sentinel in 2020. More of his poems can be read at https://philvernon.net/category/poetry/
Helen May Williams formerly taught at the Warwick University. She is the author of Catstrawe (2019), The Princess of Vix (2017), and a parallel text translation of Michel Onfray’s Before Silence (2020). ). Her debut novel, June, is published by Cinnamon Press/Leaf by Leaf. She is a Cinnamon Pencil mentor.
Phil Wood was born in Wales. He has worked in education, shipping, statistics and a biscuit factory. His writing can be found in various publications, including: Snakeskin Poetry Magazine, Fly on the Wall (issue 6), Ink Sweat and Tears, London Grip, The Bangor Literary Journal.
Marc
Woodward, poet and musician, writes from
rural Devon. He has been widely published, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize
and commended for the Acumen and Aesthetica prizes. His collections
include A Fright of Jays (Maquette 2015), Hide Songs (Green
Bottle Press 2018), and The Tin Lodes - a collaboration with
Andy Brown (Indigo Dreams 2020).
Mantz Yorke is a former science teacher and researcher living in Manchester, England. His poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and e-magazines in the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, Israel, Canada, the US, Australia and Hong Kong. His collection ‘Voyager’ is published by Dempsey & Windle.
