Fiona Theokritoff, "New Uses for a Wand"

Fiona Theokritoff is a poet and educator, with a science background. She lives in Nottinghamshire, and has worked as a Creative Writing tutor since 2017. She did her Creative Writing MA at Nottingham Trent University in 2019, and as one half of Wine and Words, she performs her work at book festivals and other book events across Nottinghamshire. In the 1980s, Fiona studied Ecology and Environmental Science, and went on to have careers in publishing and as a health practitioner. Her first book, New Uses for a Wand, was published in June 2024 by Five Leaves. Her work has appeared in poetry journals including Mslexia, The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears and Consilience, a journal created to forge connections between the sciences and creative arts.

About New Uses for a Wand, by Fiona Theokritoff 
New Uses for a Wand is a book about transformation, from the way our world has transformed myths and old magic into science, to the transformations that we as humans experience: those we reach for and those that are thrust upon us. 

In this wide-ranging pamphlet there are poems about lapis lazuli, the Periodic Table, the James Webb Space Telescope, and about people being in love, growing old, facing loss and taking revenge.     

You can read more about New Uses for a Wand on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From New Uses for a Wand

The One Thing Brian Cox Taught Me

At the outer edges of our eyeballs,

184 million rod cells stand

ready for this low-light moment.

We are seeing stars.

The tiny lights hover,

we are bathed in photon streams,

two lovers full of whispered dreams,

starlight from faraway and forever

        star light

          star bright

        shine on my retina

                  tonight

A 13 billion light-year journey ends,

illuminates us   with a flash

of rhodopsin       workaday magic.

Ancient light is

        perceived,

        captured,

        persists,

                dances

            free in our eyes,

answering the lovers’ eternal question…

so it is true, that nothing        in this moment

has existed        in quite this way before.

 

Photosynthesis

          Magnesium  - Mg2+ - activates enzymes in phosphate metabolism. 

          Constituent of chlorophyll. 

Biology: A Functional Approach, MBV Roberts

The Magus takes centre stage,

and in his own limelight,

creates alchemy

with simple wandering players:

                             sunlight

6CO₂ + 6H₂O –––––––→ C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Photons cascade through stacks

of green lamellae coins, exchange

one currency for another.

Sugar strings will become

coiled sugar rings,

a chorus line of can-can dancers,

energy locked in their sweet skirts.

Released, that sun-sparked flash

means a flower will bloom

a grub will feed.

Green blood throbs.

Silent Magus sits.

Kathy Pimlott, "After the Rites and Sandwiches"

 

Kathy Pimlott, photo by Harry Wakefield

Kathy Pimlott’s collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2022 and she has two pamphlets with the Emma Press: Elastic Glue​ (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). She has been published widely in magazines, online and anthologies. Her poems have been longlisted, shortlisted and placed in competitions including Magma’s Editors’ Prize (2019); the Poetry Archive’s WordView 2020 Collection; the National Poetry Prize (2023), the Rialto Nature and Place Prize (2023) and the Buzzwords Competition (2023). She leads workshops in-person and online.​​ Pimlott was born and raised in Nottingham but has spent her adult life in London, the last 45+ years in Covent Garden, specifically Seven Dials, home of the broadsheet and the ballad. She has been a social worker and community activist, and worked on a political and financial risk journal, in arts television and artist development. She currently earns her living as the administrator of a charitable trust which undertakes community-led public realm projects.

About After the Rites and Sandwiches

Centred on a sudden accidental death – its shocking actuality, the aftermath, the admin – Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet is an honest, lyrical and nuanced journey through the complexity of bereavement.

As the world around her continues on – moths remain attracted to lights, Christmas comes and goes – Pimlott lives with the irreplaceable absence that follows the loss of a partner. Amid the pain and emotion is a streak of wry humour at the mundanity of settling affairs and a powerfully personal trajectory of moving through grief rather than moving on.

Across poems that take stock of the things people leave behind and the sometimes-painful memories of a long and textured marriage, After the Rites and Sandwiches tracks the rollercoaster of grief, guilt and regret without losing sight of the enduring salve of love.

You can read more about After the Rites and Sandwiches on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From After the Rites and Sandwiches, by Kathy Pimlott

Prologue: First Date

Imagine we stand on a rope bridge over the canyon, where

rhododendrons cling to crevices, daring the corsairs to sever the

ropes with their scimitars, sipping cocktails that don’t make us

any drunker than we are. It’s sunset. From somewhere down

below, a small orchestra and mid-career soprano render Strauss’s

Four Last Songs, which makes the corsairs weep until tears roll

down their tattooed forearms. This lasts for an hour, no sudden

nightfall, no bats. The corsairs exhaust themselves. Chastened,

they return to their three-masted galleon anchored in the bay.

How very lovely the sky – that tenderness before light dies.

Megan Taylor, "The Therapist's Daughter"

 

Megan Taylor is the author of five dark novels, most recently, The Therapist’s Daughter, an eerie psychological thriller, released from Bloodhound Books in September 2024, and We Wait, her take on a traditional haunted house mystery. Megan’s short stories can be found in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground, and in many other places, including Weird Horror Magazine and GONE: An Anthology of Crime Stories. For more information, please visit her website here. 

About The Therapist’s Daughter, by Megan Taylor

Forgetting is difficult but remembering might be worse …

Caitlin Shaw fled Underton fifteen years ago when her girlfriend was accused of murder, but concerned for her mother’s health, she’s forced to return to the village and face the secrets she thought she’d left behind. As her family starts to unravel, Caitlin’s soon questioning the truth about the tragedy and her girlfriend’s guilt. But if her first love was innocent, could the killer still be out there, watching and waiting, far too close to home?

From The Therapist's Daughter

“Enough,” Jill muttered. “For Christ’s sake, stop.”

She refused to put up with the racket from her daughter’s room any longer. The ceiling was quivering, the whole house bristling, and with her head feeling just as invaded, she stalked out into the hall. But she’d barely mounted the stairs when the girls’ infuriating whoops and laughter erupted into screams.

The noise was dazzling. It sheared the air like knives and Jill’s first instinct was to cover her face. Instead, she broke into a run.

But though she flew up the steps two at a time, as soon as she hit the landing, everything apart from the screaming slowed to a sludgy dreamlike pace. The wallpaper’s roses tumbled lazily past, the deep pile carpet tugged at her heels, and even when she made it, panting, to Caitlin’s door, she felt like she wasn’t keeping up, as if she’d left herself behind. 

Another Jill remained holed up in the living room, still jabbing at the stereo and knocking back her Chardonnay, and still cursing Richard – bloody Richard – for abandoning her. He should have been home hours ago.

Except what was she thinking? Caitlin was behind that door, part of those screams, and coming abruptly awake, Jill grasped hold of the handle and plunged inside, and the darkness was nearly as shocking as the sound. She longed to back away.

Teika Marija Smits, "Waterlore"

 

Teika Marija Smits is a UK-based writer and freelance editor. She is the author of the poetry pamphlet Russian Doll (Indigo Dreams Publishing) and the short story collections Umbilical (NewCon Press), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Rubery Book Award, and Waterlore (Black Shuck Books). A fan of all things fae, she is delighted by the fact that Teika means fairy tale in Latvian. Teika is on X/Twitter @MarijaSmits and her website is here.  

About Waterlore
The thirty-fourth in the Black Shuck "Shadows" series of micro collections, Waterlore contains seven dark, fantastical stories on the theme of water – from the depths of the oceans to a public swimming pool – and explores the many facets of romantic love, family life and forgiveness. 

You can read more about Waterlore on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read a sample from the collection. 

From Waterlore, by Teika Marija Smits

Lady Seaweed
or
Tristresse

Mathey Trewella, why did you come a-calling?

Mathey Trewella. His name is like the salt that clings to my lips: bitter, acrid, dead. I go about my business, watching over my little ones, but he is always here in my mind. Mathey Trewella, gone too soon.

I call to my children but they pay me no heed, so I keep the warning to myself: Kee-kee! Kee-kee! Be careful! Be careful! and I hope that it gives them protection enough from unseen rocks and drowning waves.

I can’t believe how big they’ve grown; that rock that they’re playing on – scrambling onto and diving off – was too far out for them last year. Soon it’ll be too close to home. I have to laugh at the humans who mistook us merfolk for manatees. My children, little waifs, are all bones and agility. And besides, manatees give birth to live young. We merfolk are more like platypuses, laying eggs and then breastfeeding our young.

Those humans tell tales about us mermaids. They cover our breasts with shells and say that we spend our time combing our hair; they believe we’re enamoured of the human form. Yet none of our kind could ever desire a human, with their hairy legs and strange, cold voices – always at odds with Mother Earth who provides for them. My children’s father, my merman, all sinew and strength, is all that I’d ever want.

Mathey Trewella, why did you come a-calling?

Megan Taylor, "We Wait"

 

Megan Taylor is the author of four dark novels, How We Were Lost, The Dawning, The Lives of Ghosts and We Wait, a haunted house horror. She has also had many short stories published, some of which are included in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground. Her next novel, a psychological thriller, The Therapist’s Daughter, is due out from Bloodhound Books in September 2024 and she’s working towards a second short story collection. Megan lives in Nottingham. She has been running fiction workshops and courses for over ten years. For more information, please visit her website here. 

About We Wait, by Megan Taylor

The wealthy Crawleys can’t abide a scandal, so when fifteen-year-old Maddie’s behaviour causes concern, she’s packed off to the family’s country estate, along with her best friend, Ellie. But while Maddie is resentful, Ellie is secretly thrilled. A whole summer at Greywater House, which she’s heard so much about, and with Maddie, who she adores …

But from the moment the girls arrive, it’s clear there’s more to the house and the family than Ellie could ever have imagined. Maddie’s aunt, Natalie, and her bedridden grandmother are far from welcoming – and something has been waiting at Greywaters, something that flits among the shadows and whispers in the night.

As the July heat rises and the girls’ relationship intensifies, the house’s ghosts can’t be contained and it isn’t just Ellie who has reason to be afraid. Three generations of the Crawley family must face their secrets when past and present violently collide.

You can read more about We Wait here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From We Wait

The woods were crowding so close when Ellie woke that, at first, she thought she’d dreamt her way right through to dusk. Before she’d allowed her eyes to shut, they’d been driving past white-walled villages and golden fields, the lazy spin of wind turbines on a hazy hill. Now there was nothing beyond the car but trees. They made a tunnel of the road, reaching out with fringed branches to brush the roof and overpowering the Beetle’s air conditioning with their rich, sweet breath. Ellie remembered Maddie mentioning the woods around Greywaters. Maybe they were nearly there? But there was no sign of a house, just those stretching limbs, the endless leaves …

All that green was dizzying; Ellie rubbed a sweaty hand across her face. Her head was still thick with sleep, her body aching, her shoulders stiff from holding herself apart from Maddie, who was sitting in the cramped back seat beside her.

Maddie didn’t return her gaze. She remained bowed over Ellie’s phone, half-hidden by her hair, a perfectly straightened auburn wing. She’d been that way for hours, ignoring everything but the mobile, which she’d grabbed from Ellie as soon as she climbed into the car. In the driver’s seat, Maddie’s mother continued to fume. 

Ellie could see Sara’s narrowed eyes in the rear-view mirror, and her mouth, sucked tight. But though she’d chewed off most of her lipstick, Sara hadn’t exploded yet. Perhaps she’d given up? It had been almost a month since she’d confiscated Maddie’s phone. 

Briefly, Ellie considered exploding for her, snatching the mobile from her best friend’s fingers, yanking the window open and hurling it out. Instead, she leant towards Sara, trying to think of something harmless to say, and that’s when she saw the girl.

A girl standing in front of them, in the centre of the road. 

Standing very still, as if stunned or waiting, framed by the green, the trees, like a girl in a picture.

A moment ago, the road had been clear. The girl must have come scrambling out of the woods, though the verges looked impenetrable, the trees bound with nettles, their thick branches entwining. The bright July sky reduced to a scattering of stained-glass pieces overhead.

Caught in the canopy’s shade, the girl didn’t appear to be crossing. She wasn’t moving at all.

Neil Fulwood, "The Point of the Stick"

Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has published three previous collections with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled; a collection of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books; and two pamphlets, Numbers Stations and The Little Book of Forced Calm, with The Black Light Engine Room Press. Additionally, he has written three books of film criticism, including The Films of Sam Peckinpah, and co-edited with David Sillitoe the tribute anthology More Raw Material: Work Inspired by Alan Sillitoe. Neil is married, no children, but has a time-share arrangement on his neighbours’ cats.

About The Point of the Stick, by Neil Fulwood
On 6 June 2023, I wrote an untitled eight-line poem about the conductor Leopold Stokowski and sent it to friends on a Messenger group dedicated to classical music. It was intended as a bit of fun: a “guess the maestro” challenge. They guessed correctly, reported that they’d enjoyed the poem and urged me to send another. And another. 

By the end of the month, at which point the Muse threw her hands up and took a leave of absence, I’d produced a sequence of thirty-nine poems, each one seeking to distil the essence of one of the great maestri, either by alluding to their personality or focusing on a formative moment in their life or career. These have now been brought together in The Point of the Stick, a collection which races allegro con brio through a century of recorded music and the maestri who dominated the podium. The poems remain untitled (a list at the end of the book provides a who’s who) and I present the following two poems in just such a format and invite readers to guess at their identity.

From The Point of the Stick

The composer-conductor 
as two-way street;
highbrow educator 
as hep-cat populist.

White tuxedo, bow tie:
podium elegance shot through
with Hollywood cool.
Surface and depth.

He conducts as if possessed
or transported. Mahler 
surges through him, 
an ecstasy of revelation.


*


Mr Hollywood, suave sultan
of the soundtrack; jazz
pianist par excellence; now
maestro, music night popular 

career unfolding as a preview
of coming attractions 

all the right moves made,
by anybody’s definition, 
in absolutely the right order.

Giselle Leeb, "Mammals, I Think We Are Called"

 

Giselle Leeb’s debut short story collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called, is published by Salt (Oct 22). Her short stories have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Litro, Black Static, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She has been placed and shortlisted in competitions including the Ambit, Bridport and Mslexia prizes. She is an assistant editor at Reckoning Journal and a Word Factory Apprentice Award winner 2019. She grew up in South Africa and lives in Nottingham. Twitter: @GiselleKLeeb 

About Mammals, I Think We Are Called

Ambitious and playful, darkly humorous and imaginative, these strikingly original stories move effortlessly between the realistic and the fantastical, as their outsider characters explore what it’s like to be human in the twenty-first century. Whether about our relationship with the environment and animals, technology, social media, loneliness, or the enormity of time, they reflect the complexities of being alive. Beautifully written and compelling, you won’t read anything else like them.

You can read more about Mammals, I Think We Are Called on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the collection. 

From Mammals, I Think We Are Called, by Giselle Leeb 

Everybody Knows This Place

At the entrance, he waits next to the big sign with the ancient photoshopped picture blending guest houses, motorhomes and tents. “Caravan and Camping Park,” it says. The national park opposite has been restored for maximum authenticity. Just don’t look too closely at the birds. 

He finds himself listlessly plugging and unplugging his left eye from its socket. He’s started to wonder about this habit, and he’s also secretly proud of it – a nervous tic, really, something more pure human than cyborg. People remove them deliberately for cleaning, but he does it spontaneously, and this feels good. He tries to stop the ‘why’ following, to try not to explain it. 

He unplugs the eye and points it at himself. He looks pretty much the same as everybody else, and that’s OK, that’s good, otherwise he might be made to feel inferior. Nobody does these days. It’s unnecessary, distressing even. Everyone gets along: no fear, no war. And emotions remain, though faint, like delicate imprints, a slight tang in an otherwise ordinary cup of tea, or ‘cuppa,’ as he’s taken to calling it. 

But the new theme park has generated faint hints of excitement in him, a recognition perhaps of the ongoing need to connect with fully human roots. Something unexpected, not factored in. They still don’t understand it, but they’ve finally admitted defeat and created the conditions to meet the need. 

K. L. Slater, "Missing"

 

Kim Slater is the number one bestselling author of seventeen psychological crime thrillers. She has sold over two million copies of her books worldwide. She has also written four Carnegie-nominated Young Adult novels as Kim Slater for Macmillan Children’s Books. Kim has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University and lives with her husband in a small Nottinghamshire village. Her website is here. 

 

About Missing, by K. L. Slater

I've known him all my life. I know he has taken my daughter. His mother says she can help me. But she's the last person I can trust ...

Samuel lived next door when we were children. We were inseparable. But he didn’t like sharing me with my adored little brother. And one terrible night, he got rid of my brother forever …

Now, years later, he’s free. And my daughter is missing.

I turn on my baby girl’s unicorn nightlight and bury my face in her pillow, my heart breaking. I know Samuel has her – he blames me for ruining his life, and even after all this time, he still doesn’t like to share.

As darkness falls, there’s a knock at my door and I open it to see Samuel’s mother. She says she can help me.

I know I can’t trust her, but I don’t have a choice. With each step I take, my fear grows stronger. Can she help me find my daughter? Or does she know something about what really happened all those years ago? Something that could stop me from saving my baby girl …

From Missing

Prologue

Twenty-six years earlier, 1993

The disused warehouse was massive, but Jimmy was trapped in a tiny room within it.

Earlier, he’d climbed in through a broken window and looked around. The old metal machinery was still intact. It ran in lines up and down the vast floorspace. Some had been broken into bits by vandals, others had metal pieces stripped from them, but all towered above him like dinosaur skeletons.

Jimmy had been in the place about ten minutes when he’d heard shuffling noises and a funny strangled noise like someone had coughed and tried to cover it up. He’d run further inside the wide-open space of the warehouse and seen a door standing open over on the far wall.

When he’d got closer, he’d spotted an old sign hanging lopsided on it. Jimmy was the best reader in his class, if you didn’t count the new boy. He’d held the sign straight so he could see it properly and pieced the sounds together. He’d said slowly to himself: ‘Re-frig-er-ation unit.’ Everyone knew it was dangerous to hide in a fridge in case the door shut by accident and you got trapped.

Jimmy had pushed the sign hard to watch it whizz round on itself and it had flown off, clattering to the concrete floor. He’d looked around in panic, watching and listening for movement but all was still. He’d stuck his head through the gap and squinted into the gloomy unit. There was no fridge in there.

The shuffling sound had seemed like it was getting closer. Jimmy had stepped inside the unit and waited for his eyes to adjust. There were no windows in here. The room was very dusty, bare shelves all around it and rusty metal hooks hanging from the ceiling. The door had been weirdly thick and heavy when Jimmy had pulled it to behind him, leaving just a tiny gap.

People at school said the warehouse was haunted by two burning women. Once a food manufacturing plant, lots of people had died here ten years ago when there was a fire and a big explosion. Nigel Burley in Year 6 had said he’d seen the two women in the Easter holidays last year. Everyone had sat quietly in a corner of the playground, listening as he’d told how they’d rushed past him screaming, their hair smoking, the flesh melting from their faces. Nigel had told them he’d thought they were real people until they both ran through a solid wall and disappeared, leaving nothing behind.

So Jimmy had held his breath when the shuffling sound had drawn closer and he’d bit his knuckles to stop himself crying out. If the burning women pulled open the door, he would put his head down like a Spanish bull and charge forward. Ghosts weren’t real, they were like fog. You could walk right through them.

He’d heard heavy breathing and then the door had begun to open. Jimmy had caught a scream in his throat and balled his fists ready to run. Then the door had been pushed hard from the outside, like someone had their shoulder against it. When it had closed with a clunk, the space was plunged into pitch black.

Shreya Sen-Handley, "Handle with Care: Travels with My Family (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"

A CNBC and MTV journalist and producer, and East India head for Australasian Channel [V], Shreya Sen-Handley has authored three books for HarperCollins: the award-winning Memoirs of My Body (2017), short story collection Strange (2019), and travelogue Handle with Care (2022). 

A Welsh National Opera librettist, the first South Asian woman to write international opera, she has written for their film series Creating Change (2020), and operas Migrations (a 200-performer production touring Britain in 2022) and Blaze of Glory (2023). Her play Quiet premiered in London with award-winning Tara Theatre (2021). 

A columnist for National Geographic, CNN, The Guardian, and more, she also writes a syndicated newspaper column for India. Her essays can be found in anthologies, including the University of East Anglia’s Writing Places (2019) and Hodder Education’s British secondary school English textbook, Detectives (2020). 

Her short stories and poetry have been published, broadcast, and shortlisted for prizes in Britain, India and Australia. In 2020, her poetry spearheaded a British national campaign against hate crimes.

She teaches creative writing at British and Indian institutions, including Cambridge and Nottingham Universities, illustrates for Hachette, HarperCollins, Welsh National Opera, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, and Nottingham City Council, translates literature for National Literacy Trust, and commentates on BBC Radio.

About Handle with Care: Travels with My Family (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

Shreya Sen-Handley’s Handle with Care is a blithe and zippy travelogue that chronicles her adventures around the globe. In tow, most of the time, is the ‘quirky clan’ comprising her British husband, their two children, and their dog.

Here are tales of the world beyond south Kolkata and Sherwood Forest – places they call home. From much-loved Indian locales like Rajasthan and Kerala to bustling international capitals like New York and Paris, from English idylls like Dorset and Haworth to the sleepy pleasures of Corfu – the journeys are described in vivid detail, seasoned with humour, and sprinkled with wise trip-tips. No matter how gruelling the trek, you weather the storms well, and while you’re about it, have tons of fun, food and epiphanies. Mishaps or not, one learns, there is always magic to find.

These are delightful stories that’ll take you places without having to move an inch!

Here is author, naturalist and TV presenter Lee Durrell’s description of the book: “I feel a deep personal connection to this book. Gerald [Durrell] always told me that one of the reasons for his family’s move to Corfu was that his mother, Louisa, missed India terribly. She had been born, married and brought up children there, relocating to England only because of the sudden death of her husband. In the grey, damp and cold, she pined for the vibrant sights, sounds, scents and tastes of India, for the company of a warm and generous people, and the vivacity and colour her life had once had. Corfu, so like India in these many ways, rekindled her love of living. In this book we’re immersed in India, Corfu and all other points of the compass, the author skillfully guiding our way and revealing the treasures that each and every place surely has. But above all, this is a book about love – romantic, parental, familial and whatever the word is for the family dog. About love of place, history, literature, poetry and art, all around the world. It celebrates adventure and fun.”

From Handle with Care, by Shreya Sen-Handley

From the chapter ‘Corfu: Garden of the Gods’

Exploring the villages and beaches, we stopped to refuel at the open-air tavernas that dotted every jetty, roadside, and spit of white sand. As delicious as the food was, with an abundance of aubergine, lamb, and feta cheese, the joy of taverna-hopping was as much about the varying views it offered each time. The finest were, of course, on the beach, looking out at the cobalt blue Mediterranean Sea, but the roadside ones were perfect for watching people, who were as colourful and chaotic. We enjoyed sniffing out markets just as much, some big and bustling, others secretively tucked away, and a few twinkling around harbours like seashells lost in the sand. From these we bought baskets of fresh, flavoursome food, and the occasional trinket. We swam in the sparkling sea too, but it was a cooler summer than usual, and more joy was to be had in walking along its pristine shore. These delights were entwined with our search for the Durrells’ old villas – the strawberry pink, the daffodil yellow, and the snow white, preserved in my memory from childhood.

We decided to give many of the better-known and disputed sites a wide berth for the hidden gems, even if their links with that famous family were just as weak. This took us to many quiet lanes, overgrown copses, and deserted watering holes no one had set foot in in years. Some we set out to find and never did, some we discovered to be disappointing, so devoid were they of mystery and romance, and others we stumbled upon by chance. Many we drove up to, especially if they were on elevated ground, smelling of evergreens and dusk, so late in the day did we arrive after hours on the hunt. To get to a few though, we had to abandon the car and walk down dense tracks, following glimmers of sunlight, and our instinct for the hidden and the glorious. In an abandoned orchard we followed a pearly glow to find a diminutive but dazzling edifice that was well worth the nettle stings, but not likely to be the Durrells’ snow-white villa for how few of their extensive menagerie of guests and pets it could have held. Down a path of long grasses heading out to sea, we discovered a vibrant yellow establishment, like a sunflower in a field. But we both agreed after a cursory search that it lacked the required je ne sais quoi to be their daffodil-yellow villa.

It was on our way back from this find that we decided to stop for a picnic in a sun-dappled olive grove we’d spied earlier. After a satisfying meal of fresh bread, olives, and feta-stuffed tomatoes, we decided to explore. It was then that we discovered the house concealed in the cypress trees. A house we weren’t expecting because it wasn’t on our map. In a patch of land humming with life but deserted by humans, stood a faded ruby villa, large enough for a boisterous family and its many wards, but not so large that it couldn’t lose itself with time and the onrush of vegetation. We circled it, standing on its vine-entwined porch, looking in through its weathered windows, but as desolate as it clearly was, it felt oddly lived-in too.

We sat on the porch, breathing in the tranquillity of the moment and the reticent beauty of our setting. When my husband put his arm around me, I lay my head on his shoulder, and a few kisses were exchanged. When he leaned in for the fifth (or thereabouts, I don’t often count when kissing), we heard a noise in the house. It could have been a chair pulled back for a better look at what was outside. Or a harumph – the clearing of a human throat – to indicate the undetected presence of an onlooker. We jumped, casting around to ascertain who or what it could’ve been. ‘Can you hear a goat?’ my new husband hazarded, proving himself not very well acquainted with goats. I, on the other hand, had grown up in a part of Kolkata overrun with goats, and knew a cloven hooved critter when I heard one. ‘Human, I think,’ I whispered to him, as we made for our car. We had largesse in the back, in the form of mouth-watering food with which we did not intend to part. Nor did we want to be arrested for trespassing, or for our spate of kisses. Scrambling into the car, we were sure it felt more crowded than when we drove in, yet thought nothing further of it.

Suddenly our own villa was quiet no longer. We heard the tread of unfamiliar footsteps in the empty kitchen. The splash of water when no one was in the pool. Whispers in the garden that weren’t leaves in the breeze. And on one occasion, another of those harumphs we’d heard at the apparently abandoned villa.

Alan Baker, "A Journal of Enlightened Panic"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and has lived in Nottingham since 1985, where he has been editor of the poetry publisher Leafe Press for the last twenty years, and editor of its associated webzine Litter. His previous poetry collections include Variations on Painting a Room (Skysill, 2011), Letters from the Underworld (Red Ceilings, 2018) and Riverrun (KFS, 2019). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi. Below, Alan writes about writing poetry, and his new pamphlet, A Journal of Enlightened Panic (Shoestring Press, 2020).

About Poetry and A Journal of Enlightened Panic

By Alan Baker

I still have strong connections with Newcastle (there's a poem in Tyneside dialect in A Journal of Enlightened Panic), but Nottingham is my adoptive city and I've lived there since 1985 (I recently published a book entitled Riverrun which is sixty-four modernist sonnets about the River Trent in its Nottinghamshire stretch). I started writing poetry in my teens, gave it up, then returned to it in my late twenties, but I didn't publish my first, slim pamphlet until I was forty-two. I've published ten collections of poetry since then. Why do I write poetry? Because I love it, always have - not writing it I mean, but poetry itself, reading it out loud, hearing it read, reading it silently, and I've loved it since I was a youngster enamoured of G. M. Hopkins and Robert Frost. So I wanted to "be in that number" as the song goes, and learn the art.

A Journal of Enlightened Panic is a short series of poems, most of which are dedicated to someone, mainly other poets, and includes a collaboration with the poet Robert Sheppard (see below). The collection starts and ends with two long poems. The last poem is called "Voyager," a reference to the spacecraft of that name; the poem is in memory of my mother, and it combines images of space travel, a night-time walk and a sea journey. The opening poem is about "the thoughts a man may encounter as he walks the park in the autumn of his life," which thoughts encompass ecology, art, politics, John Donne, Keats, Shakespeare and the Zen Buddhist master Sunryu Suzuki.

The disk on the book cover is the “Sounds of the Earth Record” which was placed in both Voyager spacecraft when they were launched in 1977.

Two poems by the imaginary Slovenian poet ABC Remič

If I Were ...

If I were a blade of grass
I’d be bending in the wind
like all the others, in the wind

off the Karst that smells of the sea.

If I were rowing in the ripples

I’d be unrolling in crinkles of

light against the hills, distance
unthreading perception, gently.

If I were empty of perception

I could abandon History and encounter

The World, my enemy, my friend,

my teacher, in all its variousness.

If then, beyond Time, flung across Space,

a jay caught in a gust, I’d know

Identity is a silhouette bird acting as scarecrow,

choking up a paroxysm of irony.

If the scarecrow smiles, if Sirens

call lonely men on container ships,

and ghosts walk the leagues of grass,

then storm clouds, tribal wanderings, ritual.

If overhead wires trapped onto a page of dashes

tell us of nothing, or next to nothing,

then the solid black I feel is not ghostly solid:

my ears are up to my eyes in Reality.

 

Slovenia (excerpt)
An advertising hoarding of a rearing horse,
a railway platform reduced to a grey smear.
Slovenia! I'm sick of your posturing, I'm weary
of your constant demands for attention, your angst,
even the tightness you leave in our collective lungs
that the romance of a steam-train cannot relieve;
the rearing horse is a symbol for a British bank,
the trains run on time, sure, but they take us nowhere.
Hills hunch black like slag-heaps, while streamed cctv
images of cobbled streets and marble kerbstones
infiltrate our dreams; a pixelated Ljubljana Old Town
lacking its charm and suppressed memories.
Lit buses in long lines ease up the crowded street
packed with faces at bright windows, and I run
to catch one, full of workers heading home. My people?
"hard-working, diligent and proud" the brochures say,
using my tainted words. A queue, stiff in readiness,
waits, as one, his pin prick pupils deep in their sockets,
like a bronze statue of one of our obscurer saints, leans
forward and hisses "You can't get on without a ticket."

Note: Poems were written jointly by Alan Baker and Robert Sheppard for the latter’s anthology EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors).

Neil Fulwood, "Can't Take Me Anywhere"

Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham in 1972, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has published a media studies book The Films of Sam Peckinpah (Batsford), and co-edited and contributed to the tribute volume More Raw Material: Work Inspired by Alan Sillitoe. He has published two poetry pamphlets, Numbers Stations and The Little Book of Forced Calm, with The Black Light Engine Room Press, and two full collections, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with Shoestring Press. 

About Can’t Take Me Anywhere

By Neil Fulwood

The title poem of my second collection was an in-joke between me and my wife, a phrase I’d use to account for my too-loud comments in public about politics and the state of the world, my tendency to kick against pretentiousness or elitism, even though expressions of the “pile of wank” variety are generally frowned upon in art galleries or amongst polite company. I’ve always been an opinionated little bugger, and that opinionism carries over into the poems in all of my published work.

My first full collection, No Avoiding It, was ordered into three sections: a ‘then and now’ sequence contrasting my childhood in the 1970s with the Nottingham of today; poems of work; and poems about pubs. The work poems were drawn from two and a half decades of generally pointless white collar jobs. Last year, I finally realised that the world of paperwork, make-work and office politics was untenable, chucked my job in the governance department of a healthcare facility, and trained as a bus driver. Best move I ever made. 

My latest collection, from which the featured poems below are drawn, is also in three sections but not as rigorously ordered as No Avoiding It. The first is threaded together by poems of driving, motion and travel; the second looks critically at Englishness and how recent political events have bastardised the concept of national identity; and the third acts as a counterbalance, containing poems of love and friendship as well as some lighter, knockabout pieces. I have chosen a piece from each section. 

For further details about the book, see the publisher's website here. 


Coast Road

Back-handed gusts of wind come off the water,
side-slam the car. I’m thinking of that poem by Heaney:
the heart caught off guard. I’ll trade that
for sharpened driving skills, on-point response
to the switchbacks and gradients of a road
supplemented with escape lanes – last-ditch
slow-downs for the brake-failed, the wheel-locked.

Earlier, the shoreline was a photo-opportunity:
a silver medal for the play of light on water;
crofters’ cottages, open land; the railway line
daring itself closer to the edge than the road.
Now: snow. Great driving flakes of it
from a grey-white sky. Push on? Turn back?
I’m thinking there’s no real difference.


England

Scratch the surface and fingernails snag
on Facebook posts arm-banded with hate.

Spade the earth with boot heel encouragement
and feel the bite-back of roots twisting whitely.

Christen the dull metal of the plough, drag
trenches through topsoil; repeat

till the land is scarred. Dig deeper. Sink holes.
Send Euclids rumbling into the depths of open cast.

Let shit-brown mud coat the yellow buckets
of JCBs. Unearth bones and broken skulls.


The World According to Dads

The system of the world
was plotted out in sheds and garages,
the odd codicil offered
from the earthy perspective
of an allotment.

The system was measured
in units roughly corresponding
to how far a thumb
and forefinger can be held apart;
about that much. The system,

in short, was a guesstimate
but a bloody good un.
The system was built on spare parts
and laths of pallet wood
nailed together. Duct tape was used

in plenitude. All the screws
were Philips head. That box of rawlplugs 
came in handy. The design flaws
in the system of the world
were mulled over on fag breaks

taken round the back
so your mam didn’t see. The system
was stripped down and rebuilt
and swearing was involved. 
Second time round, it worked.

The system of the world
was notarised by Messrs Black
and Decker, countersigned 
by those fine fellows Bosch and DeWalt.
There were oily thumbprints

on the paperwork.