James Nash, "Notes of Your Music"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter. Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015. A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his third collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021. Notes of Your Music, a collection of sonnets bookended by two older-free verse poems, was published in June 2025. James's website is here.

About Notes of Your Music, by James Nash
In his fourth collection of sonnets – bookended by two free-form pieces – James Nash sets out to celebrate what may be gone, or flag up what might be celebrated before it goes. From the simple music of the bottle bank (a favourite task), to the biggest questions of the human experience, the poet's gentle, perceptive gaze illuminates all it surveys, delighting and moving in equal measure.

You can read more about Notes of Your Music on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Notes of Your Music

Petals – a preface

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

1: This Resolution

This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.

 
2:  The promise

The parrot says, "Good morning," from its pen,
The menu is open in front of us
And I am in the world of choice again,
A solace, and all its promises.
If I were a doctor I would harness more
The power of self-prescribing, it brings
A sense of autonomy, of growth, the core
Is stimulated again and my tired heart sings.
It gives my self a chance to recalibrate,
To sift through what I feel and what I know,
Let melancholy in and then what fate
May choose to find for me, to show.
I rattle like buttons in a toffee tin,
I need to sort them. So let me in.

James Nash, "Heart Stones"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. 

Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter.

Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015..  

A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his latest collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021.

James's website is here.

About Heart Stones, by James Nash

In his third volume of sonnets, James Nash examines urban and seaside environments in a Yorkshire he has known through fifty years of living in the North. His sonnets soar over the land - from Leeds, a predominantly Victorian city, to the Wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire, walking and cycling into the natural world with a pen and paper never far from his hand. 

James openly shows his debts to the great poets and writers of previous generations, from Winifred Holtby to Philip Larkin, from Matthew Arnold to Dylan Thomas. To borrow some of his won words, James's gifrt sit to be a "clear microscope" for our times, finding hope in the many "miralces of detail" that pass through his unwavering gaze.

Below, you can read two poems from Heart Stones. You can see further details about the collection on the publisher's website here. 

From Heart Stones

Yorkshire skies for Patricia

We shared these Yorkshire skies at different times,

A West Riding jumble of spire and mill

And, much later, the eastern coastal dreams 

Which began for me at Garrowby Hill.

I’d no idea fifty years ago

That each daily walk would now be full of you,

The cliffs and beaches, where white pebbles glow,

Each prospect of the Wolds, each distant view.

And yesterday I saw across the bay

As dusk deepened with the slow dropping sun,

You signalling in the last dregs of day;

You are the lighthouse flash, not yet quite done.

I would give you a heart-stone from the beach

But you are fading light, too faint to reach. 

 

Heart stones 

I 

The incoming tide has covered them, fanned

Over, drowned the heart-shaped pattern of stones

Made from beach pebbles and secured in sand.

Large, white punctuation marks; the bleached bones

Of a dinosaur’s toes, gathered, arranged 

By a young artist on a bike with time

He did not have, until all slowed and changed,

To leave temporary signs in chalky rhyme.

From our cliff top eyrie we see it all,

Huge heart under water unmoved by tide.

Can love survive whatever might befall,

Perhaps live on when other things have died?

Just this; in slow erosion, it is worn

Down, dissolving more each day, stone by stone.