Flight
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 33 of Allegro Poetry Magazine
which marks a significant milestone. Allegro is now ten years old. During that
time, I've had the privilege of publishing the work of hundreds of poets,
some well-published but others published for the first time. As always, it's
been a joy reading all the submissions but hard to make a final choice from my
shortlist. I hope you enjoy reading the selected poems.
Poems
Under the
Radar
It came
suddenly across the moors
in a great
quell of the wind
red kite-
sharp winged, huge and unexpected
rising into
the air and turning
westward as we
watched-
visitor from
miles beyond, working
its shape into
a new world,
so its russets
became as familiar
as the dried
curls and bronze of bracken
as the wide
sunset glow,
and the brown
trout in the swirling stream.
Martin
Rieser
Wing Geometry
(Hawker Hurricane
Restoration Detail, Scheme B Camouflage)
Across the pane, an X
of tape,
the cross repeated on
each window
here in Operations—
we call it luck the
bombers overshot.
Beyond the field,
the thump 250s make
confirms ‘…not us’.
From the bell we meet
the sun in minutes,
climbing through stink
and brightness.
We kill, are met and
killed, in cold
over picture-puzzle
landscapes.
When wreckage
the colour of Kent
marshes is recovered, you will find
I am twenty this
autumn.
Earth and sky are
muted, riveted contours
painted hawthorn and
damp clay, sheared
where the Messerschmitt
rolled
just faster.
Estill
Pollock
Anecdote
for Poets
‘A chiffchaff was singing at Wembdon’
for
Annie Fisher
It
was a hundred years since Edward Thomas
passed
through this village on his bike
in
pursuit of spring, the tyre marks
of
his prose career behind him in the mould,
ahead
the sea, and poetry, and war.
She
thought she would go and find the place
he
had heard a chiffchaff as he sped
away
from that first Easter Monday
of
the five still lying in wait
hatching
their plan. Yet she was uncertain
what
she was hearing, as she heard
that
in her absence a bird had entered
the
house and flown to perch on her computer,
(though
preferring woodland, a low nest)
and
sung its own name to itself.
John Greening
Dragonfly
So
like a mythical creature it’s named after one.
Since
the seeing of time
looking
with its thousand eyes.
Dodging
easily, flying
like
a creature that just invented flight.
Good
for the heart to see it
flit
above the path and then double back for a second look
as
curious perhaps in me as I am in it. Or seeing something
that
I, distracted, have missed completely.
Warrior
who has defeated time.
Holder
on to water messages
and
tales of wind changes.
Rider
of the slight breezes.
Carrier
of jewels that blend into a wisp of flower spit.
Hannah Linden
Wind and Light
A Red Tail Hawk leaps
up from a telephone pole
and climbs the wafting
currents of morning wind and
light, through a hole in the sky.
Jason Ryberg
Flying to Majorca in March
Drop me down out of the cold wet gloom
Into the orange trees in bloom:
The olives, almonds, windmills, cypresses,
The black-eyed girls with wild tresses;
Where once were barren hillsides, peasants,
mules,
Are now estates with swimming pools.
Robin Helweg-Larsen
Winter Buzzards in Knox County
They sit far apart
on the bare branches --
a troop of turkey vultures
a rare sub-group
high up, unmoving
like black candles.
The old canal town
not far from here
has its own legion
of midnight black
ravens, like ink
letters smudging
the winter sky
in an inverted script.
But here, with us,
as if resting
from the turned fields
of some great slaughter,
these tearing predators
linger, as signs
life has no return.
Like underworld judges,
drawn into the air --
the constant wash
of winter rain --
they do not support
one another or us.
They only await
our arrival beneath
to catch our breath
at this terrible
beating of wings.
Royal Rhodes
Point of flight
waking I hear the Christchurch-bound
plane above the house
a slim cylinder of
fifty seated souls ascending
elbow to elbow they await
the altitude of relaxation
soon the mountain on their left
will give way to less definite
territory
hills and forests and rivers reduced
to abstract depiction
but these astonishments are no
longer the events they once were
tapping into an unimportant
hunger to be absent
below and behind them the sound
and the final darkness of morning
recede
and with them the witless
bother of dreams
Tony Beyer
Kites
All
we needed was newspaper,
some
strips of wood,
scissors,
glue, rags, string,
a
stick to wind it round,
and
a Saturday afternoon.
Sometimes
if we had a dime,
we
bought a kite kit instead,
made
a sleek one
of
bright new tissue.
I
can still feel that gentle shock,
that
tug on my arms
as
the kite lifted aloft,
and
how I learned
not
to depend on steady winds,
was
always surprised
that
each flight, each crash,
was
different, was a new love
from
beginning to end.
M.S. Rooney
Echoes of
Flight
Watching Ramayan on television, I saw Hanuman,
Flying to Gandhamadana
to save Lakshman’s life.
The light went
off; summertime, I stepped outside,
Breathing
fresh air.
A sound
blasted, tearing the sky apart, a black shadow,
A huge figure
like Hanuman, approaching with force.
As it drew
closer, I saw the cargo plane,
Rising from
the air base.
Times have
changed, every page we turn,
History’s
sages knew how to fly, across cultures,
Not just in
the East, their stories now seem a wonder,
Yet we cannot
judge their culture by our present scale.
I often doubt,
could people really fly?
Indian texts
speak of it,
How did these
charismatic souls achieve what we cannot?
Their
mysteries elude us, bound by our own present limitations.
The light
returned, I went back inside,
Resuming the
episode where I had left off,
Hanuman’s
flight,
A reminder of
stories that transcend time and belief.
Utsav Kaushik
The Airman
A canyon-wide smile I wish to
nosedive into,
plunge to my debris dashed death on
jagged rocks,
happy to be part of something more
than myself.
The red of my blood would hide her
lipstick stains
and the multiple wounds would shroud
the bite marks on my neck.
I would be one with her until they
recovered my remains,
hoisting my wreck past the grazing
parting of her lips and to the sky.
I might awake, then, in the fires of
hell,
having flown into the mouth of the
canyon to sample forbidden fruit
growing out of the rock and dust in
the shadowed depths.
I might find my eternal tormented
existence
is to stare at her canyon-wide smile
from a distance.
Joseph Blythe
A Clattering
It’s
after I hear of his death
that
I see dozens of jackdaws
perched
in the boughs of the beech trees
on
the riverbank near our house.
They
take flight above the terrace
and
I wonder what it is called:
a
collective of jackdaws
as
they darken the sky above.
The
jackdaws circle, caw and flap
over
the terrace’s rooftops -
to
leave the beech trees bare-branched.
Unweighted
and now silent.
I
am left alone on the road
as
their coarse cries disappear
and
I wonder whether it is
a
sign, symbolic in some way.
Then
I recall what the word is
for
all these jackdaws together
yes,
it is called a clattering
like
the sound they make when they call
like
the rattle from his old bike
that
I heard when I last saw him
from
the loose chain against the guard
a
different kind of clattering.
Ian Chapman
Downed
Juvenile
jackdaw flapping, flailing a loose
back-lagging
wing. From the oak a pair
coax,
pleading calls their only recourse.
Futile.
Failing.
Bedraggled,
he lingers.
Helpless.
Conspicuous. Fading.
Don’t touch.
Leave him. Exposed.
Hawks hunt
here. Walk on. Glance back.
See the pair
ascend, their fledgeling
drifting,
striving.
Reluctant.
Rifting.
Circling in
pass after pass, the pair cast
winged
shadows, spanning him over
and over in
farewell caresses. A solace.
Turn away.
Keep walking, willing the
heart-ripping
strike to happen. And soon.
Kim Crowder
Yaaponsta
“Archaeologists
have yet to uncover any evidence of prehistoric uses for the blowhole.”
Among the
crumbling remnants
Of ancient
Pueblo dwellings
In the middle
of the desert
Is a hole in
the earth — an entrance
To a
subterranean fissure
That draws in
or expels
Great drafts
of air, depending
On the
barometric pressure.
When my
five-year-old inserted
His smiling
face, the second
Condition was
in effect.
His wavy hair
was swept
Straight up
from his little head,
And suddenly
instead
Of kneeling in
the sand,
My son was
falling through the sky
And laughing
in the wind.
Patrick
Kennedy
On a Summer Day, Stonehaven
The sea is a child asleep this morning,
tantrums over in summer sun that lulls,
face crease-free, smoothly reflecting
the blue-sky cloudless herring gulls
high above the harbour walls, spiralling easily
with rigid wings that hang in updrafts.
No cynical sneers today on joyous beaks, all free
to ride the warm breeze that joyfully wafts
them higher still above the small child way below
running happily in rare release from mother’s hold
flying free across hot sand, face and feet aglow
expectantly into sea that instantly smacks with icy cold.
Mother with towel, rubs warm the bluing skin
of a child triumphant with chatter-toothed grin.
Andrew Urquhart
Hummingbird
Furious
flurry
fiery
wings
as
bird
dips beak
enters flower's dark core
drinks at that
well
fountain
where
the world replenishes
itself
my love
drinks there
holds
its place drinks long
Ed Ruzicka
Lesson 7 – The Flight
From Eight Lessons
and Carols
So
this is life at the edge. I never knew.
I
never shivered in the shadows
I
never listened to the rumours.
I
paid my way, nodded to the right people.
I
could see the edge, knew of it by repute
but
it was far away and others choose
to
stand much closer, and have more to lose.
And
so I paid my way, kept my eyes down,
and
didn’t see the edge
creep
creeping to my feet
‘til
there it was, and I was just a shuffle from a fall.
There
were whispers brushing past me on the updraft
and
each one said to me
The
edge is not a good place to be.
Neighbours
muttered to me in the street:
The
going’s good for going.
Take
it while you can.
We’re
going. Don’t be here when the army comes around.
But
when the edge keeps coming, where is safety found?
Far
away, they say. Far away and further.
To
lag behind would be consent to murder.
I
might have stood my ground, even then.
Perhaps
it’s nothing;
Other
people’s panic.
But
I’m no longer me. I’m part of us. Part of more,
and
if I stay there’s not just me to fall.
And
so we go, outrun the edge, and wait,
‘til
whispers come of the edge’s retreat.
Edward
Alport
I am waiting for my lover to leave me
Outside is a floodlight winter, even at night
I tell her: call me goddess, in the morning, pull my hair in orisons, leave me sprawled on
your bed
repeating your name
into all the spaces
god has left behind us.
The dawn is bending around us.
The mornings are a dry river dreaming of
thunder;
the same way the Romans
once built
household altars to
protect against the growing dark,
most things pray for the shock of death,
never the accumulation of debris.
Outside, we watch an
angel stagger along the
road,
eyrie skin sown back to
earth.
Hope is slow this time of year: I go to work,
We spent our last day in bed together,
waiting for the light to die.
Freya Jackson
Icarus flies 7,853 kilometers to be at his father’s bedside
Suppose I fail to arrive at your English hospital
in time
and we cross over the domes of Byzantium,
unrecognizable from the icons we carry of each
other.
Father. Son. Unholy Ghost.
The clot the surgeons now scrape will be the same
red
you blade every day onto your palette, a swanky
Reubens gash reserved for posh fabrics and nipples.
First, they will slice through decades of raw umber
underpainted in the Frontal Lobe, lit by a
candle
in the Hippocampus, past a peeled lemon Cerebellum
beside an egg-shell Thalamus, where the ideas
hatch.
Back then, every Art School taught Anatomy,
you will tell the nurses as you descend from
Anesthesia.
Half-awake in Economy,
I see you on a pack-horse bridge with your
sketchbook
weaving Dreams of Gerontius around willow stumps,
finding Delius in the corn and an Ophelia in the
weir.
You, winding love into the thickets and holloways.
Onwards you march with the Artist’s Rifles, as to
war,
leaving us in the corner of another clotted
canvas,
expecting us to hold our poses for when you get
back.
Mark Fiddes
Clouds
All
the Latin names we’ve given them––
what
are they up to? Very like a whale
may
be their airy version of charades,
fooling
each other, the little they know of earth.
Those
toppling towers of competition––
are
they no more than aerial conversation,
half-drunk
on the mead they drain
from
what we only taste as rain?
Down
here, rooted to solid ground,
we
know so much less than the half of it––
how
far their stories travel, how they measure
distance
to their unmapped horizons.
D.A.
Prince
Kite
One
summer thirty years
ago
in
a small, pretty place, near Whitby,
we
went kite dragging, not flying.
Nobody
else was out
the
gale battered at windows,
clothes
lines flapped with white.
We
ran, we kissed, hard, and I remember
the
tautness of kite string round my wrist,
how
it tugged at my heart.
Catherine Edmunds
Morning at Carterton
Oh,
there’s that bird again,
the
one we can never see.
Its
irregular, sparse call a liquid
bubbling,
but at intervals
too long for recording -
The
app disclaims its ability
to
recognise every bird song.
It’s
driving me a little crazy,
the
not knowing.
To
the nature reserve then,
which
here means just birds
where
the docent says
the
sleek black and green one,
iridescent,
with a thin curved bill,
and
ruffed at the neck
with
a collar of lace, is a Tui,
and
yes, they’re all over the islands.
Kate Noakes
L’appel du Vide
Call of the void is a siren song, a
sudden
urge to jump down the world, the denial
of being mortal like others, that you,
too,
can fly, who needs wings? Those
vultures
floating over the ruins mean nothing,
not
everyone's the same, but in the end,
don't
we all die? In my arid backyard
children
love to play in between two strikes, a
doll
falls into the well, screams of sirens,
cries
of vultures, their soft heads swarm a
hole
like rotting petals—none of us is
different.
Özge Lena
Twelve geese
soared overhead, and I
ached as they
adjusted their skein
in flawless cadence,
their wings a
rhythmic beat,
lauding the leader
as he drew
back, another now
swimming the
sky to take his place.
He who had
borne the wind’s fury
need not
justify or insist;
they
recognized male’s need for rest.
I wonder if
we, too, deserve
a break, a
pause from absorbing
the brunt of
the wind, or if we
are meant to
strain on, unnoticed,
until we fall out of the sky.
Kate Champagne
The
Bird Photographer
This
time he’ll make things easy for himself
and
dispense with the living altogether, set his sights
and
speeds on re-styling flown species, his objective
to
capture the soul of dusty, cooped-up creatures.
Along
the rows of glass cases he paces and peers
in
forgotten rooms of a provincial museum,
looks
hard for what lies beyond years of preening:
that
almost-glint of glass eye, steer of tatty tail feather.
Wings
pinned, they hold their pose as he metres out distance.
Moving
in, shooting close, he blinds the flock with flashes,
his
colour temperature bouncing off walls and ceiling,
his
backdrop of black cloth flooded in an exacted
measure
of white balance. How rich detail springs
from
morning gloom: a chipped beak, bare lore, blunt talon.
You’d
be forgiven for thinking them still breathing,
old
birds leased new life in his makeshift, private salon.
Paul
Stephenson
Song
After Edward
Thomas
Sing as it
might, he never knew its name,
there in the
beech, day after long day long,
but threw the
stone that killed it on the night
his sister died.
Next morning, the sad song
was back,
sung by another, just the same.
Seán Street
shapeshifting /
starlings
a-dance / after garden
joy
of fat-seed cake
/ &
mealworms / wiggling
in / over-stuffed beaks
/ rest on the starting
lines
of a gas tower /
then
soaring with our good
fortune
flames / through our
veins
/ their choice to perform
so openly / just a
coincidence
/ feeding a camera’s
content
capturing our precarious
joy /
/// instead
i project old
stories / about fat
balls / & dried
mealworms /
confined
to my
four
walls
The winged dove
A see him, caught, a raging fly in a
wab.
Aw tangled in parachute silk, he
flaps,
a strange heron, in uniform. Hard tae
miss
even oot on this misty moor at
midnicht.
Aye A’ve been in the pub, but jist a
few beers.
A heard a hellava clatter, mibee his
crash?
He’s ranting aboot Churchill. Expects
tae meet
him. Say’s he’s flown oer tae stop
the fighting.
Says it’s important. Says there
shouldnae be war
on twa fronts. Claims he’s important.
Turns oot
he is. He’s Hesse, the Deputy Fuhrer
o Germany.
Me? A thoucht he wis mair like thon
daft Icarus.
Finola Scott
Aberteifi Tide Times
Each
day you sit in the same chair
turned
towards the Afon Teifi’s flow
and
watch the laving tidal changes lick
the
cracked ribs of washed-up boats.
Herring
gulls scream choking calls
circle
the cockling river for prey,
one
beats on our window at its vulturine reflection.
I
know this unsettles you.
I
bring you a bowl of water, berw and foaming
and
hold the mirror to your face.
You
shave away another day of seagrassed
stubble
to leave flecks of blood.
The
oxygen concentrator sighs in, sighs out;
you
return the mask to your mouth
between
each stiff razor stroke,
craving
its breath.
Later
I drive you out to look at our cynefin
the
sand-blow ballows, sea spume and strish.
Wordlessly
we watch the final weak murmurs,
the
pull and empty of the tide
before
the water stills
and
the sea forgets its waves.
A
single gull extends its wings
and
cries
Elizabeth Wilson Davies
Contributors
Edward Alport is
a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener
and writer for children. He has had poetry, articles and stories published in
various webzines and magazines and performed on BBC Radio and Edinburgh Fringe.
He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.
Tony Beyer is a writer based in Taranaki, New Zealand. His work has appeared in national and international journals and anthologies for several decades, and he is the author of a number of poetry collections.
Kate Champagne lives in Minneapolis, MN. A lifelong lover of languages, she holds a Master’s in Spanish from Middlebury Language Schools. She is a Spanish teacher by day and a writer in the in-between, moved to give voice to the everyday experience and the complexities of the interior life.
Ian Chapman is a writer who lives in the English Lake District. He has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and when he’s not drumming with a local samba band or hill walking, he reads his poetry at the local arts centre.
Kim Crowder’s writing has been published by numerous poetry magazines and on blogs and projects focused on human-animal relations, climate change and medical humanities. Based in rural Scotland, she is a current member of the Clydebuilt 16 poetry scheme. She holds a PhD in Visual Anthropology. See www.livesinnature.co.uk
Catherine Edmunds is a writer, artist, and professional musician from the north of England, whose poetry has appeared in many journals, including Aesthetica, Crannóg, Poetry Scotland and Ambit. She was the 2020 winner of the Robert Graves Poetry Prize.
Mark Fiddes lives and writes in the Middle East. His latest collection is 'Other Saints Are Available' (Live Canon). Recent work has appeared in Shearsman, Southword, The Irish Times, Oxford Poetry, Stand and The North.
John Greening is
a UK poet, a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty
collections. He's edited Grigson, Blunden, Crichton Smith and Fanthorpe, plus
several anthologies. His essays, Vapour Trails, appeared
in 2020 and his Goethe in 2022. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected
Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor, ed. Gardner) came out in 2023.
Robin Helweg-Larsen, Anglo-Danish by birth but Bahamian by upbringing, was educated in Jamaica and at Stowe. He has been published previously in Allegro and in other international journals. After decades in British Columbia and North Carolina, he has returned to blog at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor's Harbour.
Freya Jackson is a poet from Leeds. She likes Pina Colads and getting caught in the rain and, conversely, is into yoga. The jury is still out on how much of a brain she has.
Utsav Kaushik, hailing from the enigmatic realms of North India, possesses a voice deeply entrenched in the nuanced shades of grey that define the region’s cultural tapestry. His poetic expressions, resonant with the echoes of his homeland, have found a home in esteemed literary publications worldwide. With works featured in prestigious platforms such as LondonGrip, The Paragon Journal, Ashvamegh…the Literary Flight, InkSweatTears, Indian Ruminations, Linden Avenue Literary, Hawaii Review, and numerous others.
Patrick Kennedy is an assistant librarian, an antiquarian bookseller, and the author West of House, a book of poems. His work has appeared in The Rotary Dial, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, The Literary Hatchet, and elsewhere.
Özge Lena's poems have appeared in the UK, USA, Canada, Iceland, Bangladesh, Serbia, and France. Her poetry was shortlisted by prestigious competitions such as the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2021, The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023, and for the Black Cat Poetry Press Nature Prize in 2024.
Hannah
Linden, from Devon, UK,
won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition in 2021, and was highly commended in
the Wales Poetry Award 2021. She is published widely and her debut
pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the
Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. Twitter: @hannahl1n
Simon
Maddrell has appeared in AMBIT, Magma, The
Moth, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Stand, Under the
Radar and many others. He has had five pamphlets published
since 2020.
Kate Noakes' most recent pamphlet
is Chalking the Pavement, Broken Sleep Books, 2024. Her eighth
full collection is Goldhawk Road, Two Rivers Press, 2023.
Recently moved home to Bristol, Kate has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing
from the University of Reading. Further details can be found at www.boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com
Estill Pollock's publications include Constructing the
Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments
Trilogy (Cinnamon Press, Wales). His recent poetry collections, Entropy,
Time Signatures, Ark and the forthcoming Heathen
Anthems are published in the United States by Broadstone Books. An
e-chapbook, And Then, is published by Mudlark.
D.A.
Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second
full-length collection (Common Ground, HappenStance, 2014) won
the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her third collection, The Bigger
Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
Martin Rieser Published: Poetry Review; Magma 74; Morphrog 22; Poetry Kit; Primers Volume 3; Artlyst Anthology 2020; Alchemy Spoon 2022; Ink Sweat and Tears 2019/2023, Runner up Norman Nicholson 2020; Shortlisted: Frosted Fire 2019 /2022; Charles Causeley Prize 2020; Wolves Poetry Competition 2022, Geoffrey Stevens Poetry Competition 2023, Longlisted: Erbecce Prize 2023; Winner of the Hastings Poetry Competition 2021.
Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired educator. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including: Allegro, Last Stanza, Ekstasis Poetry, Ekphrastic Challenge, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. His poetry and art collaborations have been published by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.
M.S. Rooney lives in Sonoma, California with poet Dan Noreen. Her work appears in journals, including The Blue Mountain Review, Hole in the Head Review, Leaping Clear and Pensive Journal and anthologies, most recently Alchemy and Miracles (Cassandra Arnold, Editor). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Ed Ruzicka’s third, full-length book of
poems, "Squalls" (Kelsay Books), was released in March. Ed’s poems
have appeared in the Atlanta Review, the Chicago Literary Review, Rattle,
Canary and many other literary publications. Ed, who is also the president of
the Poetry Society of Louisiana, lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge.
Jason
Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six
screenplays and a few short stories. He is currently an artist-in-residence at
both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the
Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books.
His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River
Dog Press, 2023).
Finola Scott confesses writing is compelling. poems appear widely -Lighthouse, Gutter, PB. She knows poetry won’t change the world, but continues to write. Winner of the MacDiarmid Tassie, Runner-up in McLellan (Scots) competition, she writes in Scots and English. www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/finola-scott/ Three publications. Info & poems at FB Finola Scott Poems.
Paul Stephenson’s debut collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in 2023 and was a Finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards 2024 for Gay Poetry. He co-edited the ‘Europe’ issue of Magma and helps programme Poetry in Aldeburgh. He lives between Brussels and Cambridge. Website: paulstep.com / Instagram: paulstep456 / X: @stephenson_pj
Seán Street’s most recent
collection is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, March
2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets,
and several studies of sound poetics, the latest being Wild Track:
Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong, published in July 2023 by
Bloomsbury Academic. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University and now
lives in Liverpool.
Andrew
Urquhart has worked as a teacher for many years. He writes poetry in both
English and Scots, and his work has most recently appeared in the award
nominated pamphlet, Mair Northern Nummers, and in magazines such as, Lallans,
Poetry Scotland, Clarion, Wee Sparrow Poetry, Defenestration and Dreich.
Elizabeth
Wilson Davies (@LizWilsonDavies) is a poet from Pembrokeshire
in west Wales. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Post-colonial
Literatures and has received a New Writer’s Bursary and mentoring support
through the Literature Wales scheme.