D. A. Prince, "Continuous Present"

  

Since 2008, D. A. Prince has published three collections with HappenStance Press. The second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. The third, The Bigger Picture (2022), includes ‘The Window,’ Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes anthology for 2020. Her poems have also made less conventional appearances: as bookmarks, on posters on the Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle, and even handwritten, on biscuit wrappers as part of the Wrapper Rhymes installation at StAnza in 2020. Prince reviews contemporary poetry for London Grip, The Friday Poem and Orbis among other literary magazines. 

Prince's new pamphlet, Continuous Present, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

About Continuous Present, by D. A. Prince
Is there such a thing as an ‘average moment’? If so, what might it contain? The varied immediacy of the natural world, perhaps, richly green; a conversation on a suburban bus or at the hairdresser; or the monotony of the M1 in heavy traffic, where the relentless pressure from heavy lorries and their mission statements – Driven by Perfection, Optimal Solutions, Your Tomorrow Delivered Today – tower over you and your small car. While the continuity of time brings the past close to the present, just out of sight there are other worlds: the what-ifs, parallel lives and choices you might have made. These poems explore the textures of routine experience but also glimpse alternative dimensions within and beyond our daily lives.

You can read more about Continuous Present on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From Continuous Present

I’d Got My Notebook Out

but the man by the window untangling his hearing aids
explains how the batteries stick — no, not rechargeable —
and, when the bus bounces, that the drain covers
need resetting, how it’s easier with tarmac
unlike the Chinese granite — this City Council,
that Mayor they’ve got — and he and his brother
(both into archaeology) complained —
but do they listen? Then he’s back to the cellar,
his aunt’s house, demolished now —
but you know that bar, that Belgian one —
and when the gas was put in
they found a hole, could see three arches
with those Roman bricks, and a wall,
but were the Council interested? And now
it’s all gone, but what’s beneath, buried:
who knows? Gets off at the museum
(two developers gone bust, the deadlined posters
eaten by the rain) and pavement, asphalt, tarmac
aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.

Cézanne at Tate Modern

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin. His apple-flesh grows solid
but never solid enough for him:
he’s weighing their presence, finding that they lack
what his brush won’t give. Perhaps it’s the light
falling too thin on them, too forgiving
of failure. Perhaps he can’t forgive himself,
his hand closing too tight. Perhaps
one more time will get it right, then one more time.
He can’t have too many apples. None
is perfect but it’s no longer apples that matter,
only how in the alchemy of oil and canvas
and his brush they become apples.
Obstinate, indestructible, wrote Rilke
after Cézanne’s death. Now they hang here
framed and untouchable, still challenging
the ticketed crowd nodding past,
familiar with the surface blur of apples
— Too many apples — red, green, why so many? —
not seeing each apple testing itself
against the previously unpaintable air,
the brush coming to terms with the press of paint
against weave and hand and eye.
We can’t have too many apples.

Polly Walshe, "Silver Fold"

Polly Walshe is a poet and painter. In recent years her poems have appeared in Acumen, Pennine Platform, PN Review, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine, Shearsman, The High Window and The Spectator. She was longlisted three times in the National Poetry Competition, in 2019, 2020 and 2022. In 2019, a selection of her poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in the exhibition Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery in New York City, and in the same year she won the Frogmore Prize. Her novel The Latecomer was published by Random House in 1997 and won a Betty Trask Award. Silver Fold is her first pamphlet of poems.

The pamphlet is published along with Graeme Richardson’s Last of the Coalmine Choirboys by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by University of Leicester Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, Nick Everett. Register here for the free online launch reading by Polly Walshe and Graeme Richardson at 7pm on Wednesday 27 November.

 

About Silver Fold, by Polly Walshe
We are always starting out – from ourselves and our pasts, from our own words and ideas. The poems in Silver Fold are preoccupied with how far from ourselves we can ever get, and with our struggle to make words say the fresh things we constantly need them to say.

You can read more about Silver Fold on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Silver Fold

Bridge Building

The day they came to take the phones away
Was a revealing one. Some threw devices

Into hoppers happily, lobbing them high,
Watching them fall with a whoop. Others tried

To bury, cancel, download, go AWOL. All
Pointless. The signals were dying

And the servers had combusted. Myself?
Loved it, hoped all the long-ago winters might

Return to us, the looking-at-faces, the nothing-
To-do, the night in our horses’ manes,

The bright law of the morning. We’d be
Building a bridge into space as we were meant to,

We’d laugh as we laughed once, like a river
Rising for no reason, scarcely contained –

For a few seconds fearsome, then drawing back,
Earth different, small stones rearranged.


Moving to the Coast

Don’t think of moving to the coast
Since everything you need is here.

Cars rushing by make an evening tide
And there’s something of the wharf

About these traffic lights. Gulls swarm
Behind our bin lorries on collection day

Then politely disperse.
Gulls by the sea are known to be worse.

However far you go you’ll never feel,
Sufficiently, there. Why trouble yourself?

Rumours of a better place won’t stop
But every halt has empty shops

And dummkopf men in secret clubs
And the lonely women they fear.

The painful laughter of those women
Clatters forever everywhere. They yearn –

The women and the men – for gestures
From an unconventional god

Yet find it hard to think
That Being’s bird might sing

Along this landlocked street
In preference to Scarborough or Deal

Or any flaking crust shored up
Against the indecision of the sea.

Coast is the ravelled edge of time.
It’s where you are.

Penny Boxall, "The Curiosities"

 

Penny Boxall is a poet and children’s writer who has worked in various museums. She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. She is writer in residence at Wytham Woods, University of Oxford, and was visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College in 2019. She has held Royal Literary Fund Fellowships at the Universities of York and Cambridge, and is an RLF Bridge Fellow. She created new works for Tartu and Bodo Capitals of Culture 2024. Her debut novel for children is forthcoming in 2025. Her website is here.  

Penny's new poetry pamphlet, The Curiosities, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

 

About The Curiosities, by Penny Boxall
How do we remember and memorialise when we’re not at all sure what we have just experienced? How do we know our own minds when we find ourselves by turns reflected and obscured? The poems in this pamphlet are like artefacts in a half-forgotten museum: records of how life once was, or might have been.

You can read more about The Curiosities on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

 

From The Curiosities

Equity

I see her, evenings, in the new retirement flats
near my mother’s house. The curtains
are always open, or there are no curtains,
and so no mystery. She’s young for there.
 
She sits on the neat sofa, ankles crossed,
or writes neat letters at the bureau.
Sometimes there is a glass of champagne,
a single orchid. There are never visitors
 
I have suspicions. The space is as anonymous
as a brochure: not a particle on the carpet;
cards wishing her a happy something
lined up faultless on the mantelpiece.
 
Easier to think she’s on the payroll, Equity Card
tucked inside her model’s-own purse.
Easier that than to accept she really lives
like this: all lights up, nothing to hide.

Conservation Status

Least concern                            More than you can shake a stick at
Near threatened                         Enough for you to shake a stick at
Vulnerable                                  I wish you would put that stick down
Endangered                               Can’t see the wood for the trees
Critically endangered                 What is the sound of a tree falling
Extinct in the wild                       What is the sound of no trees falling
Extinct                                        What is a tree

Blake Morrison, "Never the Right Time"

 

Blake Morrison was born in Yorkshire and was formerly literary editor of the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. His publications include two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me; the poetry collections Dark Glasses, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper and Shingle Street; and four novels, including The Last Weekend and The Executor. He has won various awards, including the Eric Gregory, EM Forster and JR Ackerley prizes. His latest memoir, Two Sisters, came out last year along with the poetry pamphlets Skin & Blister and Never the Right Time. He was Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University from 2003-2023. 

About Never the Right Time
In earlier poetry collections, Blake Morrison has broached some difficult and occasionally violent subject matter: the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the Pendle witch trials, Cold War espionage, the loss of his younger sister. In this pamphlet the mood is gentler. There's a sense of passing time or 'timefulness' - of fading memories, missed chances and the coming of age (and beyond it the only end of age). But the tone isn't mournful - humour and irony are never far away.

Never the Right Time is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by University of Leicester Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, Nick Everett. 

From Never the Right Time, by Blake Morrison

Never the Right Time

Remember the flat you sold

after the market crashed. 

Or the job you took, on a whim, 

giving up one you enjoyed. 

Or your "I love you,"

too slow a follow-up to theirs. 

Or the pregnancy

neither of you planned. 

Or the painting you liked,

red-stickered when you went back. 

Death will be the same, 

early, late, never the right time. 

Timeful

The waves bloom white against the rockface

or swamp the beach in bridal lace. 

It's the timelessness you come for,

afraid your own is running out. 

Timeful: there's a word you never hear.

It helps to be oblivious to oblivion

but you face it every night that you can't sleep.

Then it's dawn and the forgetting resumes.

Here you are, on the balcony,

the sea surrounding you,

the sun with its armful of light. 

  

Derron Sandy, "The Chaos"

Derron Sandy is a Trinbagonian performance poet. In 2021 he won the National Poetry Slam title in Trinidad and Tobago and was long-listed for Bocas Lit Fest’s Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. His book for children, A Story of Hope (2020), was published by the Pan American Development Foundation as part of a project building greater understanding between host and migrant communities in the Caribbean. Sandy is Artistic Director of youth spoken word and theatre organisations The 2 Cents Movement and The Quays Foundation, an actor – and an avid basketball fan. The Chaos is his first pamphlet of poems. 

The pamphlet is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by University of Leicester Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing, Nick Everett. 

 

About The Chaos
The subjects of this pamphlet are the individuals and communities who suffer most from injustice, poverty and violence in contemporary Trinidad. Using a variety of forms and approaches, the poems describe scene after painful scene – from the murder of an abusive boss and a killing at a gang member’s wake to a child’s suicide and the finding of a missing person’s body in a barrel – evoking the ‘chaos’ in each case with eloquence, clarity and compassion. Sandy offers no easy solutions to the social problems behind these incidents, but his poems are nevertheless imbued with a profound faith, hope and sense of redemption.

You can read more about The Chaos on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Chaos, by Derron Sandy

A Dead Child

Bareback pampers dead.
Face down on concrete dead.
Four months old dead.
 
There is a woman
bawling for the dead
in a Trinidadian accent.

A grandmother at wits’ end
dropped her grandbaby
over a ledge and the dead

child is a viral video
and a story missed
by mainstream news.
 
Chaos at its best.
What poem gives solace?
Not this dead one. 

  

A Cashier Will Kill an Employer for this Reason

The day comes when you start creating somethings out of nothings and that in itself is an intense madness. People will respond by saying “is just so it happen” and “outta the blue” and “the mad woman trip off” and other things that will ferry their ways into the inaudible realms.

In the night he used to turn a beast and she was a cave for him to rest in and one day the cave caved in and the knife that run a jagged trail from cheek to collarbone is how she excavated his demons from resting inside her. Is never just so or outta the blue or trip off. Is calculated.

Is the ability to see yourself dead from the next side of the chaos and claw your way back to life. Is stiff resistance against being twice owned (as woman and employee). Is retribution, Lucifer, for every man you hypnotise by waving his own prick in front him. Is justice. 

Alan Jenkins, "The Ghost Net"

New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester, is publishing its first full-length poetry collection, The Ghost Net, by Alan Jenkins. 

Alan Jenkins was born in 1955, and has lived in London for most of his life. He has worked as an editor, reviewer and teacher in England, Europe and the United States, and published several volumes of poetry, among them the Forward Prize-winning Harm (1994), A Shorter Life (2005), Revenants (2013) and Marine (a collaboration with John Kinsella, 2015). New Walk Editions published his chapbook Tidemarks in 2018.

About The Ghost Net

A ghost net is a fishing net, or part of one, that remains in the sea after it has been discarded or lost. Alan Jenkins’s eighth full collection of original poems (and his first for a decade) has netted a haul of painful or poignant moments and memories: places and people recalled vividly, sometimes obsessively, in sorrow and in anger. Central to these are an unnamed woman – or women – and the journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria in 2012. But the paths and ‘sea-roads’ here beckon us insistently back into a past that is not merely personal: The Ghost Net is haunted by a sense of loss in which, as a reviewer of Jenkins’s New Walk chapbook Tidemarks pointed out, a nation and the way it sees itself are implicated. And the elegiac music so distinctive to this poet is accompanied by the wit, telling detail and powerful directness that make reading him a rare pleasure.

You can see more details about The Ghost Net on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Ghost Net, by Alan Jenkins

A Song of Maine

It seemed absurd,
To be flying up to Maine,
An ‘honoured guest’, the week I’d heard
That my life would never be the same again,
That the time had come to pay for every word
I’d let go in unkindness, or in haste,
Every chance I’d let go to waste,
Each drag, each drunken fuck,
Each drop of booze,
Each bit of undeserved good luck
I’d somehow refused to use;
 
That I who’d been
The doctor, was now the disease ...
Could I have known, could I have seen
How I’d mislay that knack I had, to please
By a sort of laying on of hands?
Or, now that I had lost my touch
So that a single touch of mine appalled,
And everything came down to cells and glands,
How much, how much
I’d need you, or that when you called
To say I wasn’t real, what that would mean?

I sat and stared
At the grey Atlantic, at
The grey mist that rolled unimpaired
Over pines and firs, grey rock and where I sat –
A granite perch on Schooner Head, a deck I shared
With foxes, squirrels and a grey raccoon
– Its mask of sadness; at the moon,
Most nights, as it sailed through
A storm-rinsed sky
To mock me and my need for you,
Absurd as that seemed, to its eye.

 
Player’s Navy

I work to make my flat proof against the winters,
My flat roof, my skylights and window-frames,
Unhelped by him, who gave our claims the slip ...
When I kneel to strip the rough planks of my flooring,
Sanding when the soiled, soaked rag snags on splinters,
My head swims with the shining decks of twelve, thirteen;
With white spirit and the whiff of coiled rope. I see him
Straighten up to light another Player’s Navy Cut,
Snap the lighter shut and smooth his moustache-ends
With the back of his hand. I tell myself we were friends
As I reel home after drinking all night in The Ship,
Make my window-latches fast, batten down the hatches
Of my skylights then keel over in the wrack
Of oily rags, the reek of the years that I want back
And listen to the room creak and strain at its mooring.
 

Call for Entries: G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize 2021

Call for submissions for the 2021 competition!

Guidelines
Any student currently enrolled at the University of Leicester may enter.
Entrants may submit up to three poems.
Poems may be on any subject but must not exceed 40 lines.
Poems must not have been published or have won another prize.

How to enter

To enter please email your poem(s), one poem per page, in a Word or pdf attachment from your University email address to ngre1@le.ac.uk, with ‘G. S. Fraser Prize’ in the subject line and your name in the message.  

Deadline

The deadline for submissions is: 5 p.m. on Friday 4 June 2021.

Results and Prize
The result will be announced on Monday 28 June. 

A prize of £50 will be awarded to the author of the winning poem.

Call for Entries: G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize 2020

This is a call for submissions for this year's G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize.

Guidelines
Any student currently enrolled at the University of Leicester may enter. Entrants may submit up to three poems. Poems may be on any subject but must not exceed 40 lines. Poems must not have been published or have won another prize.

How to enter
To enter please email your poem(s), one poem per page, in a Word or pdf attachment from your University email address to ngre1 [at] le.ac.uk, with ‘G. S. Fraser Prize’ in the subject line and your name in the message. 

Timescale
The deadline for submissions is: 5 p.m. on Friday 22 May 2020. The result will be announced on Friday 19 June. A prize of £50 will be awarded to the author of the winning poem. 

MA Creative Writing Dissertation Day

By Lee Wright

On Wednesday 8th May 2019, the first ever "Dissertation Day" took place, as part of the MA in Creative Writing at Leicester. The day included workshops, presentations and roundtable discussions in which everyone shared ideas for projects. The day acted like a taster menu, featuring novels, short stories, poetry collections, non-fiction pieces, and plays. 

The day opened with a guest writing workshop by Sue Dymoke, poet and Reader in Education. This was followed by a presentation by PhD Creative Writing students Dan Powell and Karen Powell, who talked about how they managed and planned long creative research projects. Finally, all the MA students sat around a table and, in turn, spent time talking about their practice, research and explaining what they were trying to achieve in their dissertations. Everyone in the group shared ideas, reading suggestions and practical advice. The lecturers on the Creative Writing programme, Jonathan Taylor, Nick Everett and Kevan Manwaring, were on hand to listen and provide an idea of how students might proceed with their dissertation projects. They recognised that sometimes you need a person to point you in a different direction and say, “Try this other way” - making you think, or see something that wasn’t necessarily clear before. 

The day was an important addition to the course, based around a framework of encouragement. After all, a problem shared is a problem halved.

About the author:
Lee Wright’s short stories, articles and poetry have been published by Fairlight Books, Headstuff.com, The Black Country Arts Foundry, The New Luciad, Peeking Cat Anthology, Newmag and Burning House Press. Lee is in his final year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize: Call for Submissions

This is a call for submissions from current University of Leicester students for the annual G.S. Fraser Poetry Prize 2018.

A prize of £50 will be awarded to the author of the winning poem.

Any student currently enrolled at the University of Leicester may enter.

Entrants may submit up to three poems.

Poems may be on any subject but must not exceed 40 lines.

Poems must not have been published or have won another prize.

To enter please email your poem(s), one poem per page, in a Word or pdf attachment from your University email address to Nick Everett, with ‘G.S. Fraser Prize’ in the subject line and your name in the message. The deadline for submissions is: 5 p.m. on Friday 8 June 2018.

The result will be announced on Friday 22 June.

Good luck!