Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 29
detonation points, Coleridge and nukes, speechlessness, poetry from the edgelands, and much more
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: detonation points, Coleridge and nukes, speechlessness, poetry from the edgelands, and much more. Enjoy.
Under this administration, every day, I struggle to stay focused. I have a job. I write. I work in publishing, and publishing is under siege, too, especially diverse publishers. I need to raise funds for Red Hen. I need to edit, to work, to find ways to continue to live and breathe.
In Hungary, in Cuba, in China, in Vietnam, in Russia, in North Korea, there are people taking care of their families, asking the universe for change, living with joy. Our state of mind is our own. I resist. I work for change. I try for joy.
But ICE is in my city, ice melting beneath us. The unsteadiness of the world makes me feel every day like I am on the deck of the Titanic. I try to finish one thing, but mistakes are abundant. When did everything become so dire, so wildly unsteady?
Warm salt water rushes under the Thwaites Ice Shelf. It is becoming unmoored. The current president will be gone when Thwaites finally loosens from the Antarctic shelf for good, but the impacts of his policies will resonate for decades to come.
We live in a country that ignores reality, and will until it’s too late. From the start, we’ve disappeared people, species, histories.
Now, they come for us.
The climate collapses. People go missing, slip under the ice.
As the Titanic sank, the band played “Nearer my God to Thee.”
What will be the sound as our ship goes down?
Kate Gale, What Will Play As Our Ship Goes Down?
Walking on a road called Pas de l’Assassin,
I might think the sea is the victim.In the brutal emptiness,
the stubbled fields could be rolled up
and sold to market –
I might be richer, but the land poorer.The strange crucified lord
of the corn fields might answer someone’s
need, but not mine.I settled down by a tank of green waters,
drowned my sorrows by downing
a dozen oysters.Jill Pearlman, How to See the Sea
I can see sky through the whale.
Its to-scale belly propped two storeys high,
ideas layered like oil on water,
steel bent into a dream of the thing
in its city sea. […]Dr Jen Dunn writes about medicine, the inner world, mental health, her Christian faith and psychoanalysis. She has been published in a wide range of Scottish and UK publications, from Poetry Scotland to Surgeon’s News. Jen has won the Perthshire Writers poetry prize and the Society of Medical Writers’ poetry prize, and has been short-listed for the James Muir poetry prize. Jen’s first poetry collection, Tell Me About The Broken Bones, was published in 2025. You can find a copy here at Seahorse Publications.
Karen Macfarlane, Tay Whale
When I was in high school, I wrote nearly two dozen editorials and articles on the ocean and its perilous state (which was, of course, not as perilous as it is today.) At the time, there was a sense of hope that science and environmental activists would turn around the terrible ticking clock. When I am feeling especially helpless given recent (and even not so recent news) I think of those other lives I may have lived. […]
Perhaps that scientist still lives inside me a little, even though her math is bad and she probably has forgotten more than half of what she’s learned in the 30 odd years since high school. She loves research and learning new things about the natural world. The names of birds and plants, varieties or trees and flowers. She doesn’t write about dolphins or whales (not usually) but does write about mermaids more than she should. But perhaps its less like science and more a tiny religion of sorts. That’s what drives the poems sometimes, especially the ones that inhabit the natural world more fully.
Kristy Bowen, the poet and the scientist
Poet and science-writer Sam Illingworth has been noted in earlier posts in this blog — here’s a link — and I enjoy online-searching for his work again and again to find still more. Illingworth’s blog, The Poetry of Science, is a wonderful site to visit and revisit, to read and explore.
Recently I discovered the following Illingworth poem (posted at The Poetry of Science on June 19, 2025) — a poem with a bit of math AND inspired by recent research findings that living near a golf course increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease (possibly due to exposure to pesticides used on the course).
Overspill by Sam Illingworth
They do not play,
but live beside
the tailored grass.Fairways curve
where warnings should.The air carries
what water cannot hold.A hand begins to shake.
A name
slips from the scorecard.No fence keeps out
what was never invited.Previous postings in this blog including Illingworth may be found here.
JoAnne Growney, Mathematics and Golf
On this day [16 June] in 1945, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.
Robert Oppenheimer named the site, and when asked if he had named it as a name common to rivers and mountains in the west, he replied, “I did suggest it, but not on that ground… Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God;—.'”
I love a scientist who loves John Donne. Metaphysical poetry and atomic weapons: they do seem to go together in intriguing ways.I think of Oppenheimer watching that explosion. In one book I read, the author states that these scientists were fairly sure what would happen, but not certain. There was some fear that they might somehow ignite the earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. But they proceeded anyway.
Oppenheimer says that he watched the explosion and thought about The Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Once we had a crew of guys come to cut down a tree. The leader with the shaved head took off his shirt and tattooed across his back was the same line; it was a big tattoo–I could read it from inside the house. On that same day, from the gay guys’ apartment complex on the next street, I could hear disco music, The Village People and Donna Summer, in an endless loop, interrupted by the buzzing chain saws from the tree crew. Some day I’ll use these details in a poem or a short story. Or maybe having recorded them in my blog, I won’t feel the need to use the details elsewhere.
I thought with the film Oppenheimer, more people might know the history, but the significance of this day can get a bit lost. I hadn’t remembered until doing some digging this morning that the explosion was scheduled for this date because Truman had an important meeting with Allied leaders in Potsdam on July 17. Bomb as savior? Oh, so many poetry possibilities! There’s the desert aspect, the prophets that so often emerge from wilderness areas. There’s the fact that this part of the country has become a detonation point for various immigration fights through the last four (or more) decades.
Those of you who have been reading this blog and/or my poems for awhile now will be saying, “Haven’t you already explored this poetic terrain?”
Indeed, I have. Yet I think there may be more to do.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Trinity Test Site, in History, Film, and Poetry
I live about 20 miles downwind of our local nuclear power station at Hinkley Point on Bridgwater Bay. Hinkley A and Hinkley B have ceased production. In the 1980s I was one of many local people active in opposing a third reactor, Hinkley C. A poster in my front window showed a Roman soldier and the words If the Romans had had nuclear power, we would still be guarding their radioactive waste. Planning consent for Hinkley C was given in 2013 after many years of legal and financial wrangling. Construction began in 2017. It is the biggest construction site in Europe.
My friend and fellow-poet Graeme Ryan has been working on a long poem inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his keen interest in (among many other subjects) electricity. What would Sam have made of Hinkley C, just a few miles from Nether Stowey? Parts of this great work have been discussed in zoom workshops that have helped to keep a group of seven writers connected since 2020. The published work as a whole makes a huge impact; it is far more than the sum of its parts.
Last month a group of us from Wells Fountain Poets went to the delightful Brendon Books in Taunton for the launch of The Dreaming of Hinkley Point. This book, beautifully designed by Terence Sackett, combines Graeme’s poetry with mixed-media images by artist Georgina King. In addition, the artist created a film based on her images, a marvellous backdrop entirely in harmony with Graeme’s reading.
The scope of this sequence is vast, with leaps of creative imagination from Nineveh to Bridgwater Bay via New Mexico, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Zaporizhzhia, and from 1797 to the present day and beyond. Both here and in his previous collection, The Valley of the Kings, the poet shows great skill in overlaying time-frames and identities layer upon layer. There’s nothing sweet and simple about this work. It is as deep and complex as The Waste Land in its network of references, with new revelations on every re-reading. There is the power of rage, but also a strong underlying sense of the holy, the holy-ness of the earth.
Ama Bolton, The time-travelling adventures of Sam Coleridge
After the snake has swallowed its own tail—
what then? Does it tuck itself into a scaly
ball, stitch itself into a leathered sphere
to be kicked around on a green playing field
or struck with a bat as people cheer
in unison from the stands? After the river
has gorged itself on houses and tractors,
gas stations and trucks that slid as if without
protest into its onrushing mouth, did it lie
back down in its bed, its terrible hunger
quiet until the next time?Luisa A. Igloria, After
A very quick post to draw your attention to the wonderful news that Abeer Ameer, a guest reader for Trowbridge Stanza last year, is shortlisted in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry in the Best Single Written Poem category for her poem ‘At Least’ published online at Modron Magazine.
Abeer gave a terrific reading in Trowbridge last year. I know that some of you who read this blog will remember her wonderful poems and the time she spent meeting the group, talking about her writing journey and answering questions. It was a really interesting and entertaining afternoon. Abeer has been writing consistently during the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine – you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook where she has been publishing poems responding to the devastating news from Gaza.
Congratulations to Abeer and to all at Modron for championing her work. Good call, Forward Judges!
All the lists for this year’s Forward Prizes are published here.
Josephine Corcoran, Congrats to Abeer Ameer and Modron Magazine!
The Canongate Wall is a feature of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh. Designed by Soraya Smithson and opened with the Parliament in 1999, the wall is in pre-cast concrete; its monumentality and sense of flowing movement has something of the glacier, or a new-built ship easing down the slipway. Set into it are bullish samples of natural rock from across Scotland. Behind the parliament rises the dolorite rampart of Salisbury crags. Stone meets stone.
At the foot of the wall are the grey slabs of the pavement, and then the security bollards that surround the Parliament and keep passers-by safe from the constant traffic.
There are niches in the wall: rhomboids, like skew-whiff windows; they speak to the building as originally designed by Enric Miralles, who died before the project was complete. And maybe also to tenement windows, or eccentric pages of a book. In turn, set in these niches are stone slabs carved with lines from the Psalms, and the occasional proverb, but mostly poetry.
Until a fortnight ago, there were 26 carved stones. On 11 June, however, there was a small unveiling ceremony for three new ones, inserted into vacant niches. The quotations they bore were by the three living former Scottish makars: Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and me. We three were in attendance, as were Smithson, the stone carver Gillian Forbes and her apprentice Cameron Wallace. Although it was a strongly female team (the Parliament’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, did the honours), our three quotations brought the number of women’s quotes from one to four (out of 29). The only woman previously represented was the socialist and mill-worker Mary Brooksbank, with a verse from her ‘Jute Mill Song’:
Oh, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided,
Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided,
But I maun bide contented, dark days or fine,
But there’s no much pleasure livin’ affen ten and nine.After coffee and shortbread in Queensberry House, in a room often used to entertain international delegations, we filed out through the security gates onto the pavement, where one by one we unveiled our stones. (The quotations had been chosen by the public, in a vote organised by the Scottish Parliament. Three options each, approved by us, were suggested and the public were invited to choose between them. Five thousand people voted.)
First Liz Lochhead. She and the presiding officer peeled away a bit of sticky ribbon and a board to reveal a small slab of Ailsa Craig Marble:
this
our one small country …
our one, wondrous, spinning, dear green place.
What shall we build of it, together
in this our one small time and space?A few words into a microphone, some photos and Jackie Kay was next, a few metres down the street:
Where do you come from?
‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.’Then it was my turn. I sent photos to my children – both abroad – and thought about joking that I wouldn’t need a tombstone now, but I didn’t. It made me think of time passing. I wished my mother could have been there. I felt a rush of affection for those who were there, especially the poets, now we are in our third age. We have been in each other’s orbit for decades. When I began publishing, Liz Lochhead, now 77, was the only properly visible woman poet in Scotland, with her Glasgow glamour. (Very different from me. I took to writing partly because I didn’t have to be visible; the present ‘performance’ culture would have shrivelled me.) As for Jackie Kay, when she read out the lines now carved on the wall, I realised I had known them for ever, and could recite them along with her. The plain assertion of belonging, as a black person in Scotland, is now writ in stone on its parliament building.
Kathleen Jamie, At the Canongate Wall
Last Monday, I was the featured poet at A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends. This weekly Zoom reading and conversation hosted by Jimmy Pappas is so fun! I loved presenting game poems and having the attendees ask questions and make observations back to me. In addition to sharing some poems from my How to Play chapbook, I also shared two game poems I love that were written by other poets: “Do Not Pass Go” by Jennifer H. Dracos-Tice (first published in Whale Road Review!) and “Queen Me” by Kelli Russell Agodon.
Katie Manning, A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends
On Wednesday evening I walked up some very steep hills from Sheffield city centre to Novel bookshop – whose website is here – in Crookes for an evening of readings by seven poets published by Brian Lewis’s Longbarrow Press. The ethos of Longbarrow – whose tagline, ‘poetry from the edgelands’, very much resonates with me and whose website is here – is concerned with making beautiful, mostly hardback books of beautiful poetry.
The readings took the form of half the audience sitting downstairs in the shop’s back room and the other half upstairs, with, in the first half of the evening, three poets reading downstairs and four upstairs; then, after a break, the poets changing over and the audiences staying where they were. The cosiness of the rooms and the excellence of the poetry made for a much more intimate yet paradoxically relaxing set of readings.
Matthew Paul, On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth
I have a new essay out today in the This Be the Place series at Poetry Foundation, edited by Jeremy Lybarger. I wrote about the solace (and abandonment) of the pond I grew up beside on my family’s ten acres in Virginia—along with C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, a little Agnes Varda, et al—and you can read it here: “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness.”
The end of the essay references Larks, so for readers of Larks, I hope it deepens the landscape of the poems, and for those who haven’t read Larks, maybe this will encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or bookstore.
Hope you are resting and caring for yourselves and each other as best you can during this long summer,
Han
Han VanderHart, “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness”–new essay today at Poetry Foundation’s This Be the Place Series
On recent Artist Dates, Jill Crammond and I have been talking about wanting to live creative lives, to buckle down and put in work, to feel like poets, to be part of and contribute to vibrant creative communities.
There’s one problem with the wish: I think we’re already doing it LOL (I took my poetry manuscript into the Adirondacks, for crying out loud!)
As I was putting together my last recap of creative activities, it hit me: I’m doing more than I think I’m doing. So why does it feel like I’m not living a creative life? Is there a disconnect between how I’ve romanticized creative life vs. what creative life actually looks like? What does it really mean to live a creative life? Maybe the only thing I’m missing is the belief — the confidence — that I’m doing the damn thing.
Maybe I need to reconnect with the thrill of it.
Maybe I need to drop all resistance to it.
*
And maybe I’ve been so focused on the single mantra “Don’t Quit!” that I haven’t caught up with the fact that I’m no longer white knuckling the creative life .
There are different varieties of “Don’t Quit.” One is in reaction to rejection. And wow — I’ve had a couple solid years of NO’s. It would only make sense that I’ve been hanging onto “Don’t Quit” as a stubborn response to so many doors closing.
But there is another kind of “Don’t Quit,” and it’s driven not by fear but by love and passion. Maybe that’s the magic of living a creative life.
A recent installment of Erinn Batykefer’s Substack “The Long Pause” has something to contribute here. In Erinn’s interview with Kelley Beeson, author of Undress, a chapbook from Lefty Blondie Press, Kelley recalls a question from Big Magic: “What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?” Reflecting on her prior focus on publishing alone, Kelley reflects, “[Publication] became my main engine in writing. Yuck. There are other, more interesting reasons to write.”
More interesting reasons to write. Yes!
Carolee Bennett, “We’re Traveling Through Space” and Other Reminders of a Creative Life
To think I once was once juggling a dozen blogs. And now? A post every quarter at one or two places… For the curious, or compulsive readers who must finish a paragraph, I once had this poetry blog, a cat-narrated blog, one for flash fiction, a vegan recipe blog, a daily life, and a poem-a-day, a daily selfie blog, a weekly portrait of B blog, one written by a sock monkey, a weekly in Spanish/French, a dream journal, a haiku one, all unhooked from each other because that much hyperglossia would look crazy, no? And I would often binge-write and then let it autopost in an orderly fashion to give the semblance of steadiness while I, behind the screen, crashed.
A difference is keeping things for myself these days. And rather than throw things indiscriminately, I share cautiously with those who have earned trust. Who actually are invested in me. Terribly at odds with being a poet, I know. […]
I previously used all my energy as an introvert on extraversion. People said I had so much energy but I had a boom-crash cycle where after an event I didn’t function or ran the red line of panic attacks and living inside headache constantly. I mean daily headaches from early 80s to 2015 or so.
I laughed more then but chuckled not at all. I was wrapped way tight, keeping myself hopped on excitement, hafta, hafta, gotta, and sugar to extend my comfort zone, keep the walls from crushing me, learning to talk. I was aways stacking triggers to prove myself I could do anything, then wondering why everything was hard.
It’s an interesting fast headspace and I could parse at speed but there’s the sensation of inspiration without..something. The sensation of being productive is not the same thing as useful. Or as being present.
Only by hyperfocus through text I could pull out one thread of purpose from the many tangled threads and find a piece of what felt like order.
Now order is slow and quiet. Of course there are structural changes to make that happen. Ghosting bad dynamics and being less passive, more intentionally choosing instead of drifting. Balking, refusing to play, giving up FOMO, letting go of more, givng myself space to see patterns, to act not only react.
Instead of having my hand in many pies, on committees and publishing, going to many events, trying to keep contact with many people, living in thin-walled places where neighbours scream at each other and traffic noise never stops, I read instead. Probably 3x as much as when I was peak “busy”.
Pearl Pirie, Been a minute
My new mushroom-patterned dress and I will appear at Kramer’s in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday 7/22, where I’m reading at 7 pm with Steven Leyva and Tonee Mae Moll. (The dress is kind of retro and I think I look like a sci-fi 50s nurse in it, or maybe a waitress at a fungus-themed diner.) If you can’t make it but would enjoy a short recorded reading from Mycocosmic in ms form–made in January!–please check out Tina Cane’s Poetry Is Bread series.
In the meantime, a little more on Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”: I’m now firmly convinced that “Truffled Hut” should read “Truffled Hat.” As Dickinson’s fans know, she hardly ever saw her poems into print and early editors tended to bowdlerize them; in the1950s, editors started revisiting her manuscripts, some of them sewn into little booklets or “fascicles,” to translate them to print more accurately, although her ambiguous handwriting and inclusion of possible alternate wording makes that tricky. A ms version of “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” DOES survive, contrary to what the internet had me believe (shocking, I know, that a web search led me astray). Reproduced in Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, it reveals how closely her longhand lowercase a’s resemble her u’s: it’s not a matter of whether the top curve touches the upright, as you’d think, but of how close the two strokes come. All respect and gratitude to her valiant editors, who in this case interpret the millimeter’s difference perfectly plausibly. I just think “hat,” with its allusion to a mushroom’s cap, makes more sense. I floated my apostate interpretation at my Phosphorescence reading last week, a totally lovely event that was superbly run, and earned a nod from the moderator plus a comment in the chat: “Team Hat!” I felt quite pleased with myself.
Other than events like these, occasionally typing up a poem draft from a notebook, planning some fall stuff, and dealing with postponed medical appointments, I’m not getting much done in these dog days. Okay, I look at that last sentence and acknowledge I’m ridiculous, but I feel guilty when I’m not teaching yet not writing anything new. Like a mushroom, my confidence tends to evanesce fast. My rational self says, “hey, give yourself a break, your sabbatical is just starting, Mercury’s in retrograde, the world is screwed up, and you’re tired.” Another voice says, “you’ll never write a good book again and nobody sees you fruiting on the forest floor.” I see the same doubts manifesting on a few poet-friends’ social media–and even within some of the recent poetry collections I’ve been reading. Same old poetry life. My friend Emily Dickinson would tease me for getting my feathers truffled about it.
Lesley Wheeler, A D.C. reading, ghost pipes, & more Dickinson
Dear ones, I am so, so thrilled to share that my debut full-length poetry collection Once Is Not Enough is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027!!! When I received the offer to publish from managing editor Gabriel Cleveland, I wept listening to him share notes from three rounds of readers that really understood what I was trying to accomplish in the manuscript, no, the book! It’s going to be a book!
Once Is Not Enough is a collection that is haunted by loss—death, miscarriage, and language most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, the emergence of peonies in the spring, the taste of salt licked from your own palm. Formally diverse, the work includes brief lyrics and longer sequences, poems in two voices, and poems written in Korean and translated into English. There is a preoccupation with the multiplicity of meaning and voices inherent in language as well as the cyclical nature of grief and life. Music and sound are essential to the shaping of individual poems and the overall structure of the manuscript, which is divided into four numbered sections which I think of as movements.
Hyejung Kook [no title]
I’m very happy to share this new video from my upcoming book, Temporary Shelters. It was produced by Barebones Filmmakers (who happen to be my daughter and her boyfriend–both extremely talented). We did the filming earlier this year in various locations in Pennsylvania’s Poconos.
We’ll have two more videos to release probably in September when the book is officially available.
On that note, I’m also happy to share that Temporary Shelters can now be pre-ordered from Cornerstone Press (at a 20% discount).
Grant Clauser, New Poetry Video and Book Update
horses lie down beside me, one nuzzles my back.
dream life. july.
strawberries feed from my hands.
Grant Hackett [no title]
Life doesn’t have to be a series of grand gestures or great works because most living happens in the quieter moments. The accumulation of those average moments can build to greater achievements but sparks of creativity need introspection and focus. The noise of markets or a gloss of festive lights can be shallow distractions and move people away from themselves. […]
Through “Continuous Present”, D A Prince effectively presses pause, giving readers space to dwell in the moment. To create a period of time to focus on word choice or study the paint strokes, to see how small details accumulate and cohere into a complementary whole.
Emma Lee, “Continuous Present” D A Prince (New Walk Editions) – book review
So, the collection traces – in old-fashioned chronological order – the start, middle, end, and aftermath of a decades old love relationship. It’s a little bit Shirley Valentine, a little bit The End of the Affair, though the role model Farish herself suggests is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Despite the long distance recall, there is a vivid, sensuous immediacy to the writing. In lesser hands, a likely recourse would be to old photograph albums, but Farish is as liable to start a poem from an old map, still in her possession, on which the young lovers scribbled notes for their anticipated, future return (which never happened). And there must have been a lot of maps, as the book unfolds in an almost picaresque fashion with the lovers meeting in Morocco, travelling to Italy, and Sicily, onto Greece, and Crete, before a return to the UK in Oxford. One of the key methods Farish uses to convey the thrill, freedom and passion of early love is through these exotic locations, the colours and customs, the names, the booze, the food. ‘Things We Loved’ – the book’s first poem – does this via Morocco’s markets, rose sellers, taxis, tagines, its acrobats and a dilapidated cinema. In Palermo, we’re along the Via Maqueda, sampling gelato, or polishing off a bottle of Donnafugata in bed (‘Mozart’s 233rd Birthday’). Later in the book, the woman – now looking back over the decades – finds it’s still a bold Italian red, penne, gorgonzola, and oranges that conjure those long-lost days in true Proustian fashion (‘Pasta alla Gorgonzola’).
Martyn Crucefix, Helen Farish’s new collection, ‘The Penny Dropping’, reviewed
Matthew Paul’s second collection, The Last Corinthians, Crooked Spire Press, 2025 follows on from his first, The Evening Entertainment, Eyewear, 2017.
I enjoyed Matthew’s first collection and it’s clear he’s been honing his craft over the last 8 years. In this time he’s moved from London to a more rural life in south Yorkshire and (as the dedication makes clear) lost both parents. So, a different stage of life. There are still quirky, playful poems, as in the previous collection, but a sense of melancholy is more prevalent. The title poem, The Last Corinthians, is a concept I was unaware of (sport not being high on my agenda!). It refers, to a time before sport became a profession and there were players equally skilled in say football and cricket, as well as having a day job. […]
When I read through the poem titles (eg: The Ballad of Mike Yarwood, Double Chemistry, A Short History of Greenhouses, I was concerned that nostalgia was going to be overwhelming and the poems would be too similar to be interesting. Like those school reunions where you get stuck with that guy who recounts funny incidents from school at great length and with little humour, because for him they were the best days of his life. I can safely say Matthew’s poems are far cleverer, much more entertaining and emotionally sophisticated. At first, I found myself focussing on the pinpoint-accurate historical details and colloquial word choices, but on a second reading, I could appreciate Matthew’s obvious love of language, his skill with rhyme and half rhyme, and his subtle use of form.
Ali Thurm, What I’ve been reading
I will always be in awe of Paul Batchelor’s ability to use speech and voice in his poem ‘A Brace of Snipe’. (click to read)
I can’t express it any better than Andy Hopkins. who writes in his blog piece
‘ The Acts of Oblivion by Paul Batchelor – Five Reasons to Read’ how ‘ the voices of the ‘characters’ are distinct, and are distinct from the persona’s voice.’Like Andy, I also love the digressions in this poem- the skilful control that enables Batchelor to capture the sense of someone interrupting themselves as they insert detail adjacent to the narrative before returning to ‘the point’ or message of the story, which is, when it finally arrives, in no way obvious or glib. And there is a sense of ‘real people’ in their environs in this poem, affectionately and unsentimentally portrayed, in contrast to the arrogant, cartoonish, rather grotesque and undignified ‘her Ladyship’.
The second poem in the link is the deeply moving Powder Blue. Also concerned with class, and this time about the experience of being ‘Unable to escape’ where you come from and don’t fully belong, while also being unable to escape judgement for being from where you are from- ‘Listen to your accent!’
PaulBatchelor’s latest collection, The Acts of Oblivion, was published by Carcanet in 2021.Roy Marshall, Two poems by Paul Batchelor
On his website, Hosho McCreesh describes Psalms from the Badlands as “An expansive collection of 150 “psalms” or haiku-like, Japanese-style breath poems about the brutal and beautiful American southwest, with nature as the catalyst for deeper meditations on life, love, grief, loss, and, of course, death.” From poem 1 to 150, you can clearly see his awe of the Southwest, as well as his deep appreciation for haiku and related forms. For example, Poem 21 reads:
The woman’s hands,
watching them peel chile,
the way it still burned days later
in the sunlight—still burns
years later
in your mindIn my notes, I indicated how close this poem came to a haibun (a prose poem that ends in a haiku). Other poems invoke the long linked form of renku, even in their brevity, such as Poem 80:
Fingers of late spring fog,,
burnt off by morning.Early July monsoons,
the sunflowers drink deep.Brittle October stalks,
every drop baked out.And still it returns
as January snow.Beyond their connection to the haiku world, this collection does an exceptional job of capturing the landscape and atmosphere of the Southwest in a visceral way. I particularly appreciate that the human element is not removed from these poems, as we are as much a part of the environment as the animals, plants, and weather. Poem 25 is one of my particular favorites in this regard:
Red chile ristra
cleaned of harvestmen
& their cobwebs.Water boils
red as a
Jemez flood —Hungry, we wait for
carne adovada.Ultimately, when reviewing my notes, I don’t find a single disliked poem, or piece that seemed out of step with the broader collection. Psalms from the Badlands is not just an example of exceptional writing, but also a masterful demonstration of how to organize a poetry collection.
Allyson Whipple, Review: Psalms from the Badlands by Honsho McCreesh
At several points throughout the collection, ‘but’ acts as a hinge, starting a last line or a final stanza, just like in the above example, indicating a change in tone as McCaffery homes in on the core of his inspiration. And then in the poem’s concluding clause, ‘as if’, another of McCaffery’s favoured turns of phrase, also kicks in with a leap that lends the poem an extra layer.
When looking at this quatrain in depth, it becomes clear to the reader that those three devices (‘but’, ‘though’ and ‘as if’) all undercut each other in turn. Absolutes no longer exist in vital and linguistic terms. Supposedly modest and clear-cut words suddenly take on unexpected new ramifications.
This additional depth of nuance is to be savoured by any reader, but especially by McCaffery aficionados. Skail evokes the undercutting of everything that came before it, hinting at riches to come in his future writing, a significant landmark on his continuing poetic journey.Matthew Stewart, The undercutting of everything that came before, Richie McCaffery’s Skail
The full-length debut by Philadelphia poet Mia Kang, following her pamphlet debut, City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020), is the impressive All Empires Must (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2025), a title I found unexpectedly second-hand at Books Upstairs in Dublin, of all places. “I summon my cruelty / but cannot / name him.” she writes, to open the poem “The Author Calls Him X,” “I am // failed / by my rage, / love // embodied in / an ardent relation / with limits, voice // made by not / doing, not saying.”
All roads lead to, and away from, Rome in these poems, as Kang writes around and through an empire and a series of moments across the stories of ancient history, specifically the founding of Rome. There’s a coyness to her directness and vice versa, writing specific and slant through figures and stories known and less-known, getting to the heart of each character and encounter across a wonderfully delicate lyric. As the poem “In a Roman Story” offers, writing Rhea Silvia: “That wasn’t / what she wanted: she asked // to face the wall / to more fully be // -come the gate he sought. / Oh Mars, you mistook me // for someone / I briefly was.” There is such thoughtful and incredible pacing across these poems, one reminiscent, slightly, of Canadian poets George Bowering or D.G. Jones, the slow hush and halt and play and propulsion of Canadian postmodernism an accidental (I can only presume) patter across her lines. “I have to tell you: I made two. / Didn’t know how else // to make it.” begins the poem “Roman Couplets,” “I put them / a double return a // -part on the page, let them / fall through sky // side by side. I oppose / these maneuvers, but the truth // is there were two— / one left me, one loved me, // they were the same.”
There’s something magnificent in the way Kang articulates elements of Roman history, offering elements on how to hold to a single thought, or reach across decades, attempting to articulate the ways in which one might live, might be; each poem a small moment, each of which together collect and pool into accumulations of large movements. Through Kang, poems and books are composed out of moments, providing a powerful precision of thought, story and word. She writes a book-length narrative, one that provides both an expansiveness and a pointed specificness, held in space, in amber.
rob mclennan, Mia Kang, All Empires Must
One of the things I enjoy about writing these reviews is opening a collection or pamphlet of a poet whose work I don’t know and finding that I’m immediately drawn to it. That was my experience with Pete Strong’s Greenfinch (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2024). Even more enjoyable is returning to those poems and each time finding more in them. I have read Strong’s pamphlet several times and that is still my experience, such is the strength of the work.
The poems are concerned with discovery, of achieving a deeper understanding of the self and of the poet’s place in the world which he inhabits. Significantly, the title poem, Greenfinch, is a highly charged expression of discontent with the speaker’s life. He expresses a desire for something entirely different, the life of a greenfinch, which symbolises the happiness, fulfilment and love which has eluded him. He sums up his aspirations in the final line: ‘In my next life I want to be flying.’ He wants to be able to put his current concerns behind him, rise above them, find new perspectives upon life, but perhaps there is also a sense of wanting to escape, to ‘flee’. At the end of the collection, however, we meet an entirely different speaker in the poem, Maps. He tells us that he carries a map, ‘not to find my way/ nor in case I get lost.’ No, he carries it, because the map ‘reminds me of who I am.’ This is a man who has found himself at last, one who has achieved a new perspective on life, so urgently desired in the former poem. Like the greenfinch in flight, he is able to look down upon the landscape, that is ‘a record of my soul’s use,’ which ‘has soothed like a lullaby/ these last few years. It is/ the portrait I have been painting each day.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Greenfinch’ by Pete Strong
A long time ago, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina,” I didn’t realize that the title referred to the poem’s form. I thought that “Sestina” was, perhaps, the grandmother’s first name—a different form, if you will, of the name “Tina” – “In the failing light, the old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child.”
Once I understood that a sestina is a specific poetic form, however, I decided I would write one. How hard could it be? Well, yeah. I’ve yet to write a sestina I was happy with. It’s a form that’s gotten the best of me every time.
The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines a sestina as having “six unrhymed stanzas of six lines each in which the words at the ends of the first stanza’s lines recur in a rolling pattern at the ends of all the other lines. The sestina then concludes with a tercet (three-line stanza) that also uses all six end-words, two to a line.” Although technically accurate, I think you will agree that this description leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of actually understanding how to write a sestina.
I was intrigued, therefore, by Terrance Hayes’s article, “Your Do-It-Yourself Sestina,” at the Poetry Foundation’s website. The subtitle perfectly reflected my feelings about the sestina: “I almost always anticipate failure or boredom when I attempt the sestina. It’s among my favorite forms.” It’s true, the sestina is one of my favorite forms, but as an admirer of other people’s work, not my own.
I enjoy writing in forms because, as Hayes puts it, “As in almost every excursion into form, I hope simply to be surprised and challenged.” Forms do surprise, and they certainly challenge. I love how the repeating lines of pantoums and villanelles create their own weird logic, and how a formal poem often delivers more poetic satisfaction than free verse. As Hayes writes, “The sestina’s numerological architecture and lexical repetition create a lyrical, potentially alchemical energy.”
Erica Goss, Sea and Stars: Writing the Sestina
Well, we drove through multiple mountain ranges and wildfire smoke both ways in the five-hour drive to and from La Grande, Oregon. Average temperature? 92°F—with red flag-level winds. I’d never seen how empty most of the states of Oregon and Washington are east of the Cascade mountains. Lots of twisty mountain passes, then miles of semiarid scrub, barely a McDonalds or Starbucks to be found. La Grande, almost at the very Eastern end of Oregon, is a little mountainside oasis—a drive-thru Starbucks, little Eastern Oregon University, where the low-res MFA program held its New Nature Writing Conference. We made it there the first day and we were pretty exhausted, the heat and smoke were hard on my MS symptoms, so I barely had any sleep before I had to get up, dress, teach a class on Solarpunk poetry, and then get ready for a reading and Q&A. Immediately after, we turned around and made the five-hour drive home, barely getting through the mountains before the dark settled in, and once again chased by wildfire smoke. The faculty, staff, and students at EOU were warm and friendly, and I felt very welcomed and thankful to be invited to speak—especially on nature and ecology, which are definitely subjects I’m very interested in, but man, physically this trip was hard. […]
One question I was asked during my class was “how do you keep your optimism with things like these wildfire evacuations?” (One of my friends texted me during the class she was evacuating her nearby small town.) How do I keep optimism? I wish I could remember how exactly I answered. There are always reasons to hope, however slight, and though I consider myself a realistic optimist—or an optimistic pessimist—it is hard, though imperative, to keep a view of the light, however dim. Hayao Miyazaki—along with Octavia Butler—sort of the godfather and godmother of Solarpunk—have visions of the future that, although dark, contain seeds (Parable of the Sower puns here) of how it is possible to have a more equitable, balanced world where technology, humanity, plants and animals co-exist in peace—usually after an apocalypse. So, maybe it’s around the corner any day now?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Nature Writing Conference in La Grande, Oregon, Ecology and Hope, and Grateful for Home
When she ceased whispering, skin thin,
skin frail and still tough, skin holding
almost everything that matters …
when she ceased whispering, I waswracked with coughs, choking on wildfire
smoke, invisible smoke crossing
invisible boundaries, smoke
I couldn’t smell. The forecast isfor more smoke, and more. The forecast
is for whispers leaving our lips
to take their own sweet time shifting
between states of matter, movingfrom gas to water, rock to star.
PF Anderson, Saying Goodbye, Again
We are moving yet again — I can’t believe this is the second move just since I started this substack. (Ah, no, the years, O!) After three moves in the last four years, I sincerely hope this is it for a while. I’m aiming to get a longer post out as usual later this week, but here’s a topical poem as a placeholder just in case.
As is now traditional — very loyal and longstanding readers will remember the first iteration of this post back in September 2023 — this is my favourite “moving house” poem, Hardy’s ‘During Wind and Rain’. As an extra treat, I’ve given you the whole thing this time, even though it’s only really the last stanza that’s relevant today. […]
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.Here in Paris of course it’s not so much furniture on the lawn, as furniture teetering terrifyingly on the monte-charge as they haul it all up. I had to hide in a café for a few minutes while they did the piano, I couldn’t bear to watch.
Victoria Moul, No sudden moves (2)
It’s been raining daily for weeks now. Afternoon and evening thunderstorms crash and bellow and sometimes make me jump like a scalded dog. (Do you know in Britain they say “like a scalded cat.”) Afternoon thunderstorms in summer are common in New Orleans and actually welcomed as they cool things off a bit. But when days and days of rain pass it can get tiresome. I find myself yearning for the sun and, when it peeks out, I feel my mood lift. My tropical plants love all the rain and humidity and are growing like gangbusters but my poor tomatoes look droopy and weary. Too much rain. I’m giving up on tomatoes in the future. The last four summers have been a bust and I know it’s time to accept that I don’t have the tomato touch.
*
I wrote this bit of fluff one day in 2013 when it had been raining for days and the water was over the sidewalk, creeping into the yard, and someone’s dog was barking and barking.
On 13 Days of Rain
Hush now, dog! There’s nuthin’ on the front porch but an empty chair rockin’ in the rain spatter drippin’ off the roof. This ole house is creakin’ and growlin’ but it’s holdin’ tight as a tick. Swoll up clouds are kickin’ great balls of fire and the wind’s battin’ ‘em ‘round our heads. Thunder’s rappin’ an a-rollin’ a stanky leg ‘cross the sky. Yeah, it’s loud enough to wake the dead but they best stay sleepin’ lest they float away too.
Charlotte Hamrick, Women and Nature
I think of thunderstorms on days so hot we could just run around outside in sundresses or bathing suits, getting doused, or sit on a porch and read while the lightning flashed and the rain came down in torrents. And then have garden tomatoes and corn on the cob for dinner, and go outside after dusk arrived and chase fireflies in the wet grass. These are the kinds of things that I feel nostalgic about, though I am not generally a person who gives much energy to nostalgia. It has been awhile since I had enough unoccupied time on my hands that an hour on the back porch observing the rain seemed like a valuable thing to do.
But it is.
Anyway, here’s a prose poem from my book Abundance/Diminishment that I recalled to myself while I was watching the storm.
~~
Competition, Wet Summers
…so here’s this young woman practically in tears—it’s almost one o’clock
and raining harder than ever, thunder so close it’s practically grabbing us by the
shoulders and the lights dim inside each time the sky goes millisecond-bright.
It doesn’t feel like midday. Every stall is full and the horses aren’t happy.
We can hear the skittish ones hollering, pawing, kicking at the doors. It’s a squall,
I tell Sara; but she’s frustrated, fuming, has her tack cleaned and her dress breeches
on for a three o’clock show she’s convinced won’t happen now that all hell’s let
loose in the form of torrents and flash floods, and there’s a stream coursing from
the south door into the first bay of the stable—it looks like the River Jordan.
The roof leaks at a spot directly above her shampooed and just-groomed mare
and I’ve run out of cheery platitudes and patience; I just walk myself to the barn’s
far end, feel the rain splash up my legs from the puddle at the threshold, dripping
on my neck and face through rotten shingles. The wind stops. It’s a straight-
falling deluge and hot, a no-relief rain with big drops that bubble in temporary
pools of runoff by the wash stalls. The afternoon is green and grey, the puddles
a stirred-up brown, and I remember my former boss—thirty years ago—standing
in the type shop doorway on a day like this one. The look on his face was worse
than Sara’s, not frustration or mutiny but numb desolate recall, slack and empty.
“Man,” he said, “It used to rain like this in ’Nam.”Ann E. Michael, Wet summers
It seems my sister and I have invented another tradition to go alongside our ‘sisters at the snooker’. Our new one is a July concert at Dreamland Margate. Last year we saw Suede and Manic Street Preachers and this year KT Tunstall and Texas. We are already wondering who we will see next year.
And breaking news… I can clap in time in certain circumstances! I have discovered that I can find that rhythm… when I am at an outdoor concert, when I really like the song, and when it’s been in my heart for a long time. Having not really ever been a clapper-alonger before this is worthy of a little celebration. My dancing is still a little on the wrong side of rhythmic, but I can clap along and jump up and down in a relatively beat driven way. There was plenty for me to get my hands in the air for at the concert, and lots of singing along too. […]
It feels apt to share a poem about clapping, but please note it is the kind of clapping at the opposite end of the continuum to the ones described above!
CLAPPING
You can hear your own clapping
louder than anyone else’s.
You are not matching the rhythm
of anyone in this room.
Soon they will be looking at you
willing you to stop.
You try to change the way
your hands hit one another
but you cannot unhollow the sound.Sue Finch, ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE
Maybe it’s because I’ve finished Novel No.5 and am letting it stew, because I’ve finished compiling the poetry collection and am thinking how best to take the next step to publication, there has been a pause in writing. No poems, no short stories, no stop-gap stream-writing.
We’re working on the smallholding, strimming areas where the flowers have died off, bringing in new hens, testing an old incubator, building a pig ark (arch), planning basic repairs and improvements. And, of course, watching Test cricket on TV and keeping an eye out for what comings-and-goings summer brings at West Bromwich Albion.
The previous life of a sports writer, latterly boxing, but before that cricket, football, swimming too, has long been consigned to history. For years I’ve been selling off, giving away, all the bits and pieces I hoarded over my career. It’s been nine years now and there are still books everywhere that I’ll never need to read or dip into again, reminders of a life that to some extent I don’t want to be reminded of.
I was ok as a writer. I got by. Earned a living. Travelled. Worked at the biggest world championship fights of my generation, worked alongside some fine writers, and felt the privilege of the lifestyle before, eventually, it nearly killed me.
Journalism has changed as technology has changed but I feel fortunate to have worked when I did, among people who wrote sport better than I did, from whom I learned, whose company I (mostly) enjoyed. I suspect press rooms, or media centres as they’re called now, are more anodyne places than they were, full of devices of one kind or another, not so full of raucous laughter and energetic arguments. The insults we traded in fun on a daily basis would give today’s HR people nightmares. Success is measured by the number of hits a story achieves. It’s the way it is. The meaning of expertise has been transformed. […]
Journalism is a different art to poetry, obviously. A proper journalist writes about other people, a subject outside of him or herself. A journalist, as have I told those who have asked to interview me on blogs and podcasts as I’ve become older, is not the story.
I’m fortunate that I have written all my life, have learned a craft, and adapted it as and when needs arose or the inclination took hold.
Now to sorting out the piles of old sports books that can go. A man is coming later this week because he believes some are worth sending to auction. I don’t know what he will choose, if any, but one thing is certain – he won’t be looking at the poetry section.
Bob Mee, AN UNEXPECTED TIME FOR REFLECTION
hair grows on the tops
of my feet. call me whatever comes to you.
i want to be a purple thing. a crepuscular self.
it is summer & i am not barefoot enough.
i use “he” pronouns like the tight shoes.
a gym class kind of word. i imagine
the “h” like a house with a chimney.
a place to go & take everything off.Robin Gow, he/him
I have been unwell, and craving silence, surrounded by workmen and hubbub, and heat that leans on me like a nightclub beat. I cannot bear talk of politics, can no longer tolerate expressions of righteous indignation. I can’t listen to music I don’t make myself. Am mute in the face of idle chitchat. I am thinking about the impossibilities of communication, of directives, of explanation, excuses, of justifications, logic, of misplaced humor, thought-less jabber. Only this morning, wind on the water, wind among the many leaves, that susurration. The sound of clouds moving across a broad sky. That is all the sound I can stand right now. But maybe the whisper of fabric against fabric as you sit next to me here under this sky.
Marilyn McCabe, in a sudden strangeness
Non-head-injury-related aphasia is new to me. It’s been a strange month. Some parts of speechlessness are familiar, or bound to the age of 15, and some are new. Too new. Wandering through Ingeborg Bachmann’s lectures and nonfiction essays has been a solace, even though reading is strange: I begin a sentence and then lose my grip on it. Not even the most voluptuous syntax holds my attention. It’s as if words have lost their teeth. […]
I’m not sure why this is comforting to me. Perhaps summer, itself, has whisked this gluttony for comfort and silence into my head. But speechlessness gives me time to type old notebooks, which is how I discovered an essay draft from early last year titled “A Eurydice Who Limps: Analogy and Your Orpheus,” a glance at various textual and artistic treatments of the Orphic myth.
After typing up a bit of it today (while groaning over my terribly tiny handwriting), I dug up my copy of Maurice Blanchot’s essay, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which turns Eurydice into an absence of light waves, rendering her the “profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night seem to lead,” dragging her silence into what Christian theologians would mark as “the fortunate loss,” a peculiar sort of metaphysical baggage that continues to haunt various religions as well as theory […]
Alina Stefanescu, “Language is punishment.”
Pull another chair. Let grief sit with
us like a friend. Let us tell it our
saddest dreams. Let us hold hands,
let us feel fire burn through us not
like flames but like a fever, feel cold
that chills, not like ice but like a tomb.Just for a moment, destroy euphemisms,
masks, prettiness. Just for a moment, let
it be the beginning. Let it be raw. Let
it hurt. Let despair seep into ears and
eyes and skin. Allow the world its
ugliness. Allow the abyss its hungry
depth. Allow sorrow to hold us close.
Allow it to tell its side of the story.Rajani Radhakrishnan, In which the terms are non-negotiable
Appreciate you and this, Dave!