Christine Hammond, "Sojourn: Moments in Poetry"

 

Christine Hammond began writing poetry whilst studying English Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her early poems were published in The Gown (QUB) and Women’s News where, as one of the original members she also wrote Arts Reviews and had work published in Spare Rib. She returned to writing after a long absence and her poetry has been featured in a variety of anthologies including The Poet’s Place and Movement (Poetry in Motion – The Community Arts Partnership), The Sea (Rebel Poetry Ireland), all four editions of Washing Windows and Her Other Language (Arlen House) and literary journal The Honest Ulsterman. She has also been a reader at Purely Poetry - Open Mic Night, Belfast.

Her collection Sojourn: Moments in Poetry has just been published in both digital and paperback forms.

About Sojourn: Moments in Poetry, by Christine Hammond 
Stylistically concise and visually vivid, this collection invites the reader into a reflective space – one filled with poetic resonance, yet open to individual interpretation. Whether inspired by real life, fictional construct or social observation, the poems in Sojourn flow with a deliberate rhythm that mirrors the title’s essence: a journey through moments that shape and define us. All are skilfully observed and articulated, frequently using the descriptive lens of nature and the natural order as a mechanism to contextualise, interpret and seek spiritual understanding. 

You can read more about Sojourn here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Sojourn: Moments in Poetry

Flight Path

 

         Upwash to Strangford

Long and languid

the dark nights hang

heavy as a cloak 

festooned by Ursa Major

in the lane bats squeak, cats screech

a river runs tidal

and the moon’s soft filament flickers

dying to sunrise

slowly, the wild geese appear

a prelude of eager starts, then

more and more

join to shape the sacred apex

faith in formation

divine travellers lining the sky 

calling their sojourn across the dawn

gifting light from a slipstream 

Ritual

First, the ting-clang comforting din

of companion set with shovel

tuned to the scrape of grate and bucket then

fold, roll, wrap, tie, tuck it with sticks, with coal

till the glow of broadsheet rosettes

cast a news flash for the era

and headlines despatched themselves 

from the hearth

immaculate hearth of the fire altar

lit by my mother, high priestess of the house

who, standing back decreed

that coal’s more like slack, must speak to the coalman

David Morley, "Passion"

 

David Morley, photo by Graeme Oxby

David Morley’s last book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. 

About Passion, by David Morley 
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers,’ pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters.’ There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

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

From Passion

Dialect

Evening froze to a night nailed with stars.
I watched a birdbox fill with flying words
fleeing the chill by bundling in on each other.

I took the box from its hook and prised its lid
and shook the lives of language out of it
festooning my table with wings and feathers,
writhing, fluttering, like a bird made of birds:

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, 
Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, 
Feather Poke, Hedge Jug, Prinpriddle,
Ragamuffin, Billy-featherpoke, Puddneypoke,
Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, 
Long Pod, Bush Oven, and Miller’s Thumb.

I tucked them in this box before they woke.

We Make Manx Shearwaters Vomit Bottlecaps

‘Here is what a stomach full of plastic
looks like’, says the bird reserve warden. 
‘You can see it stretched so much that the shapes 
of plastic are visible. When I say we make 
shearwaters vomit bottle caps I’m not exaggerating.’ 
He twists the dead Manxie on its back, 
snipping the sac open. His forceps fossick 
into the dissected bird. Rubbish piles up 
by the body. I try to focus on the wing feathers.

Eye-bright and gliding over wave crests
the shearwater rides on updraught and jetstream. 
A placid sea is her unploughed field.
The bird bends on the blade of storm to turn 
the seabed over, drive deep swells to the surface.
The wind swings north, the moon’s gravity 
tilts the sea-surge. For phytoplankton this
is everything life needs, and they flicker 
and breed in that frenzy of crosscurrents
the fish following the glut of plankton
dumped on the surface like data 
from the dark. The shearwater’s compass 
stills, she stabs straight into the undertow 
where her fish-prey spiral in their bait-ball
like an underwater galaxy, a million stars 
spawning in a nebula of bioluminescence.

The warden stares up at me: ‘Don’t look away.’
  
This is what a poem full of plastic looks like.

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, "Year of the Rat"

 

Charles G. Lauder, Jr, was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, graduated from Boston University, and has lived in southern Leicestershire since 2000. He is the author of the pamphlets Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and Camouflaged Beasts (BLER, 2017), as well as the collection The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, 2019). His latest pamphlet is Year of the Rat (Blueprint Poetry Press, 2025). From 2015 to 2018, he was the Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House, and since 2008, he has run the South Leicestershire Stanza, a poetry writing group affiliated with the Poetry Society. He’s currently working on a second collection. His website is here.

About Year of the Rat
Many of the poems in the pamphlet were written during or just after the lockdowns of 2020–1, and though COVID is never mentioned, its shadow lurks at the poems’ margins, manifesting in a theme of survival, not only physically but also spiritually. Coincidentally (or not?), the year 2020 was the Chinese Year of the Rat. Taoist philosophy underlies the poetry here, including the titular sequence of sonnets, which is about the rats that came to live near our rural home during this time and their attempts to endure, despite predators and harsh weather. Most importantly these poems focus on the significance of family bonds in the dire circumstances of a pandemic.

From Year of the Rat

September 24th

On the same day the old upright
is busted apart in the kitchen
because they can’t get it out the door.
Hammers and ivory flats and sharps
splintering across the counters and sink.
Long-silent keys cry out, stripped-bare 
metal skeleton groans beneath the mallet.
The dog, deaf but feeling the vibrations
of the blows, hides with us in the lounge.

Our old piano tuner sounded the death knell 
months ago: this Weinard over a century old 
didn’t have long to live: Piano makers were once 
all over London, names no one remembers.
Pre-war survivors sell for a song on eBay,
ours having lived in a church hall for years,
then a damp barn, before the farmer
toted it here on his tractor, smoothly rolling
into our home, now refusing to leave.
On this same day the baby grand is tuned,
previously owned by an in-law and willed
to her priest but he was already in a home.
Elvis the mover had to remove a closet door
to get it inside our house. The piano tuner
turning up today is young, a jazz musician
by night. As if finding a lost soul a new home,
he cocks an ear, taps a few keys, sprinkles out
notes, then when satisfied he plays.

Autumn leaves cover our drive
and fill our dining room.

from The Year of the Rat

We try to inventory them—amongst
the chickens, beneath the duck hutch, 
two in the woodshed, one in the hedge 
scampering under the gate to the compost 

(and tunnelling through the straw
in the greenhouse?)—compared to the dead
found beneath the dining table

or in the cat’s bowl, bodies too cumbersome 
to be dragged upstairs and left beside the bed.
Sometimes it’s only a heart or liver,

sometimes the head is missing, the rest
too big a meal. Like censuses of old,
we only count the heads of households.
No telling how many pups they’re feeding.

Maggie Brookes-Butt, "Wish: New and Selected Poems"

Maggie Brookes-Butt has been writing all her life, starting work as a journalist and a BBC TV documentary producer. Her books include six poetry collections as Maggie Butt and two historical novels as Maggie Brookes, published by Penguin Random House. She taught creative writing at Middlesex University for 30 years, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent. As well as being a writer she is a compulsive reader, hopeful gardener, dreadful cook, besotted grandmother and a Londoner to the bone, though she loves to swim in the sea.

About Wish: New and Selected Poems
Wish contains 50 poems from Maggie's six previous collections, about the strength of women, concern for our planet, and hope in the power of love. They are gathered here alongside 21 bitter-sweet new poems about the joys and fears of a grandmother in this troubled, vulnerable and precious world. The new poems are addressed to her young grandchildren, to be read by them when they grow up.

You can read more about Wish on the author's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the poetry collection. 

From Wish, by Maggie Brookes-Butt

Murmur

My heart is whispering – this faint back-wash
is slush and suck of waves over shingle,
tumbling the stones which will lie underwater
when storms rage far above their flooded world.
 
My heart is whispering – a breeze turns
over leaves, its shivery message passes
from branch to branch at the far-off crackle
of forest flames and thudding feet of animals.
 
But whispers lullaby your sleeping form,
your peaceful unknowing, sharing secrets
of here-and-gone, here-and-gone. Listen
to its echo: love ... love ... love ...
 

Eyes
 
Mine have seen first breaths and lasts,
the beginning and end of everything,
 
green shoots and heaps of rotting leaves.
They've seen horses pulling coal drays,
 
milk bottle tops pecked by blue-tits,
peace camps, walls torn down, glass
 
ceilings cracking, gay weddings,
but children slippered in class, life vests
 
washed up beside migrant boats, turtles
choked by plastic bags, smoking ruins.
 
Mine are hooded now, the teal and amber
marbled irises surrounded by crinkled deltas
 
of skin, but still see clearly thanks to small
acrylic miracles and astonishing dexterity.
 
Yours are wide and bright, the whites whiter
than paper, almost blue, the irises two shades
 
of grey, dove grey circled by wet-slate grey.
They can spot the smallest dot of crumb,
 
bending to retrieve it, or point to the woods
where a squirrel is camouflaged against a trunk.
 
I can see what's coming, my vision unclouded
by the twin cataracts of helplessness and dismay.
 
Polar bears claim abandoned villages. Tanks roll
in again. Together we watch the leaves fall.

 

Kristina Adams, "Revenge of the Redhead"

Kristina Adams is the author of 20 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes ghost stories as K.C.Adams. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. Her website is here. 

About Revenge of the Redhead
In her debut poetry collection, bestselling author Kristina Adams channels female rage. Anger, hatred, envy – all those things society tells women they shouldn’t feel, let alone express, are explored in this confessional collection. It takes you on a journey from heartbreak to friendship breakups to workplace bullying, ending on true love and hope for the future. Whether you’re in a good mood, a bad mood, or somewhere in between, Revenge of the Redhead has a poem for you. You can read more about Revenge of the Redhead here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection.

From Revenge of the Redhead, by Kristina Adams

Enough.

I split myself in two
in the hopes of pleasing you
But it doesn’t matter what I do
I’ll never be good enough
for you.


Rocking Chairs

You said we’d be old ladies in our rocking chairs
But how can we be when you were never there?
Friendship is more than just fair weather
I want a friend who’s here forever
not someone who’s in love with spring
but can’t handle the bad weather winter brings

You left the rocking chair beside me empty
When you decided you’d had enough of me
But you were ‘just’ a friend.
And no one talks about how when friendship ends
it hurts just as much, if not more
sitting beside that open door.

Rachel Spence, "Daughter of the Sun"

Rachel Spence lives in London, Ludlow and Venice. Her poems explore themes including time, absence, motherhood and water. She has published three pamphlets: Furies (Templar, 2016), Call & Response (Emma Press, 2020), and Uncalendared (Coast to Coast to Coast Journal Winner, 2023). Her debut collection Bird of Sorrow (Templar, 2018) was highly commended in the 2019 Forward Prize. Her prose poem "Venice Unclocked," in collaboration with photographer Giacomo Cosua, was published by Ivory Press in 2022. Her poetry has appeared widely, including in PN Review, The North, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine and Tears in the Fence. Her non-fiction book Battle for the Museum, which explores the relationship between art, power and money, was published by Hurst in 2024.

About Daughter of the Sun, by Rachel Spence
From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.

Split into two parts, a sonnet sequence recounts Spence’s time reconnecting with her estranged mother – caring for her through illness and grieving her passing – before a bold rewriting of the myths around Medea reimagines her not as a murderous witch but a child-free scientist ahead of her time.

With the power and salve of the natural world always close by, Daughter of the Sun contends with being a mother and a daughter, and also what it means to liberate ourselves of those identities and write our own myths full of freedom and possibility.

You can read more about Daughter of the Sun on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Daughter of the Sun

July 1976, your garden, midnightish.

Our worlds distilled to nothing save each other 

and this bewildering heat. I hear you

padding down the stairs – morphine trickle

of a mother’s footsteps – beg you to let me

stay while you find whisky, deckchairs.

The lawn is dry as a ship’s biscuit, but we are 

watered by the scent of your tobacco plants. 

My winter’s bone is being old enough to know 

I don’t know what you’re thinking. Not even 

when the owls come. Two, maybe three,

their beatless wings spellbound against

earth’s pull. Ten seconds we’ll remember

all our lives. We know it, even then. 

Bert Flitcroft, "Seeing the Light"

 

Bert Flitcroft was born and brought up in Lancashire but now lives in the Midlands. He has three collections of poetry already published: Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink, Thought-Apples and Just Asking. His work has appeared in a number of national magazines. He is a prize-winning poet, has been Poet in Residence at the Southwell Poetry Festival and has performed at a number of national festivals including The Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015–17 and curated the on-line Staffordshire Poetry Collection. He has worked as resident poet with one of our "National Treasures," The Wedgwood Collection at the V&A; as resident poet with the prestigious R.I.B.A exhibition "The Road Less Travelled"; and recently as part of the University of Keele project "Labelling the Museum." He offers a professional mentoring service and has a long and successful history of running workshops and giving readings, not just to local poetry groups but in libraries, arts centres, gardens, galleries museums. His website is here. 

 

About Seeing the Light, by Bert Flitcroft

This book works as a collection from youth through to old age and all points between, recording moments and incidents when life and the world are suddenly seen afresh and with a greater understanding - Seeing the Light metaphorically as well as (occasionally) physically. It contains both serious poems alongside a few light-hearted ones which I hope will raise a smile or two. 

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

From Seeing the Light

Headland

It's a strolling stroll along the rise and fall

of the rolling face of the thrusting cliffs

where well-fed seagulls squabble and swoop

and the Skua threatens to skua its prey

to the mounted weathered whalebone skull

longing out to its long-lost sculling kin

in their deep and wail and the score 

of their song and wave of the waves

to the gap and the cleft where the rock

stands proud defying the rock-and-roll

and the jiving swell of the surging sea

when the winter wind cuts colder than stone

and whistles its wildness and scorns

the clouds that scud and slide down

the black and blue and blustering sky

that roughs up foam-frothed crashing wet

in the caves at the shearing feet of the sheer

rock with its tufted pate speckled with nests

and gaping and gasping and desperate beaks

in the biting squalls of summer storms

and the screech and the swooping turn of the tern

with its stay-away warning scream and dive

that mean what they say to make children scamper

and adults scram from the peck and prick

the stinging cut and rip of razor-blade beaks 

the thump and grip of curled and angry claws 

on windmilling arms and paper-thin skin

from these fearsome sprites of the wild wild.

Bridges

 

This is my uncle Albert - all ginger hair 

and ears like saucers, that cheeky smile

as if he’s pinched the last chocolate biscuit.

"Not a bad bone in his body," I’m told.

"Wouldn't hurt a fly." This was before the war,

before the children he would never have.

 

Killed he was, parachuting in at Arnhem.

A bridge too far for him, he came down 

with a hole in his back the size of my fist.

This was taken outside the mill gates 

on Crimea street. Nineteen he was. A hero.

I bear his name and carry it with pride.

 

My oldest daughter’s settled now, at home

with the kids, with the steep green hill

and dots of sheep behind. She has his smile,

that hint of mischief. And that ginger hair

that’s crossed a generation.

In the end some bridges build themselves.

Helen Ivory, "Constructing a Witch"

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for Arvon and the National Centre for Writing Academy. She has published six collections with Bloodaxe Books. The most recent, Constructing a Witch, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (2024). Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A poem from her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City (SurVision 2019 ) was selected as Poem on the Underground, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. Her work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. 

About Constructing a Witch, by Helen Ivory
Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins.  

Helen Ivory’s sixth collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.

These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems of Constructing a Witch Helen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries.

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

From Constructing a Witch

Some definitions of Witch

 

Carcass of rags

the dead-rat stink of old milk.

A beyond the pale beggar,

runt of the litter.

*

Gleaner of herbs

hallower of the compass.

Cunning hedge rider,

measurer of fire.

*

 

Midwife of shadows

low vixen with blood on its maw.

Deliverer of silence 

to the henhouse.

 

*

 

Lighter than a bible,

priestly ink is gravity

beneath her flying feet.

Her body writes into the sky.

 

*

 

Blended with the earth

she wears a moss cloak.

Some procure her remedies.

She is a scapegoat for bad luck.

 

*

 

A childless wraith

in a child’s picture book.

The worst mother 

man ever invented.

 

*

 

The method of kettling 

troublesome women.

A peck of black pepper

in the milk-and-water blether.

 

*

 

Practitioner of forgotten ways;

of rituals, sayer of spells.

Barefoot earth-listener,

older than God or television.

 

The Gift

There once was a lonely woman who replaced her heart with an apple. She took a sharp knife and engraved her name in its freshly shined skin, and those of the names of these spirits: Cosmer, Synady, Heupide. She stood in the middle of a bridge as the wind heaped bright dying leaves about. She balanced the apple in the palm of her hand, but nobody came for her love. And the earth moved through the seasons, and still nobody came. This carried on till the apple resembled some devil they say, and the woman herself had transmuted to dust.

One day a quiet pandemonium emanated from the apple and the townspeople hid behind themselves, too cowed to approach. A man stepped from the crowd with the air of a judge. He decreed that indeed, the apple was infested with foul spirits, and pitched it into the river with his long-legged boot. 

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.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, "Identified Flying Objects"

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician living in London. He is the current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip and, in partnership with Nancy Mattson, has for over twenty years organised the Islington reading series Poetry in the Crypt (now re-invented as Poetry Above the Crypt). His latest book, Identified Flying Objects, contains poems triggered by quotations from the prophet Ezekiel and thus maintains the fondness for unusually-themed collections shown in his previous publications Poems in the Case, which combines poetry with a murder mystery, and Fred & Blossom which tells a more or less true story of love and light aviation in the 1930s.

 

About Identified Flying Objects, by Michael Bartolomew-Biggs
The USP for Identified Flying Objects is that all the poems are linked to quotations from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. The idea of using this as a basis for a collection came to the author when he was semi-immobilised with a broken leg and, like Ezekiel, was working out how to deal with misfortune. The Book of Ezekiel is of course concerned with a much bigger misfortune – the plight of the Israelites taken captive by the Babylonians during the 6th century BC – and it seeks both to explain why God let it happen and also to offer a divine promise of eventual release.

Whatever one believes about its theological content, the Book of Ezekiel does contain some remarkable passages such as the first proposal for a heart transplant and an almost cinematic image of a valley full of dry bones which reassemble themselves and then gain sinews, flesh and skin to become living bodies. More down-to-earth (and still relevant) are the stern and imaginative rebukes Ezekiel delivers to corrupt and abusive rulers and his exasperated likening of the general public to ill-natured sheep led by incompetent and irresponsible shepherds. And of course there are also his mysterious visions in the sky which inspire the collection’s title poem.

Although the poems in this collection have been triggered by some of Ezekiel’s words they do not aim to paraphrase Ezekiel’s message. Some of them place an Ezekiel-like (or Ezekiel-lite!) speaker in a modern setting while others offer a twenty-first century reaction to a single image from the prophet’s text. Ezekiel might recognise – even endorse – the sentiments of a few of the poems; but many of them would probably puzzle him or even arouse his disapproval.  Attitudes have changed in the last two and half thousand years and Ezekiel’s view of the collection might well include a Hebrew equivalent of the word “woke”. But, even if his words have been carelessly and anachronistically appropriated, Ezekiel’s prophetic voice might still be heard, urging present-day readers to resist the regrettably common human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions.

From Identified Flying Objects

Heart Transplants - Side Effects & FAQs  

Rejection is a major issue
when a doctor takes a stone-still heart  
and substitutes donated tissue.

But if physicians have dismissed you
as a hopeless case you’ll take the risk – 
rejection’s not your biggest issue.

At the brink of that abyss you
wish you had been born with nerves of steel
instead of much-too-nervous tissue.

When something inside’s gone amiss you
might not need replacement body parts
so much as fresh supplies of sisu.
**

You meet your surgeons who address you
only from behind a mask: perhaps 
because they do not want to face you?

You’re told by the anaesthetist you
sleep before you’ve counted down from ten.
You hope his needle doesn’t miss you.

You dream that nurses come and kiss you
wearing scrubs – are antiseptic pecks 
distractions so they can undress you?

And when you start to convalesce, you
don’t get solid food: will you survive
digesting only tiramisu?
**

I’ll turn your stone hearts into flesh: you …
needn’t care what rocks you’ll lose – your faith
in miracles is what’s at issue.

If old resentment finds a fissure
In your new-made heart my remedy
is grafting in forgiving tissue.

(Redemption is a bigger issue.)

I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26

Sisu is a Finnish word whose meaning can be approximated by a combination of such concepts as stoicism and determined resistance.

Social Distancing

We are managing the situation.

Whenever people flow like water
through the holy interlocking boxes
of a stadium, emporium
or auditorium, their leaders
and role models must be seen among them
only briefly rubbing elbows –
never pressing hands – and passing on 
no more than they brought in with them.
They are all in this together.

As they stream through lobbies,
passages and concourses
from north and south not one of them 
may leave the way they entered.
All turnstile counters click in one direction
for the regular attenders;
any strangers, misfits
or occasional creatives
have to slip through gaps in calculation.

He who enters by the way of the north gate to worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he who enters by the way of the south gate shall go out by the way of the north gate. He shall not return by the way of the gate by which he came in, but shall go out straight before him.  Ezekiel 46:9,10

 
Identified Flying Objects

Sceptics guess that magic mushrooms helped
to open Heaven – or perception’s doors –
in Babylon  and show the awed and shocked 
Ezekiel some version of
the gyroscope and helicopter
in advance of L. da Vinci.

Ezekiel did not make sketches. He left
words instead of blueprints. Hence his engines,
while attracting less mechanical
analysis than Leonardo’s,
leave a lot more room for extra
terrestrial imaginings.

Some fantasists insist that aliens
can scrawl art deco doodles in our fields
and navigate the planet via ley lines.
Others say time-travellers
could show Ezekiel a future
three millennia ahead.

Perhaps he caught a glimpse of locust-gunships
stuttering across Iraqi deserts, 
stop-start – like the freeze-frame hovering
of hummingbirds he’d never known –
and bringing down much cruder forms
of shock and awe on Babylon.
 

The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God… Out of its centre came the likeness of four living creatures. …There was one wheel on the earth beside the living creatures … Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel within a wheel … When the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.  Ezekiel 1:1-19

Some explain Ezekiel’s vision as a clairvoyant’s (or time-traveller’s) preview of modern – perhaps military – technology. Josef Blumrich (The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974)) claims it describes a genuine extraterrestrial encounter of the kind reported in literature dedicated to phenomena like UFOs, ley lines and crop circles. 

Heidi Slettedahl, "Mo(u)rning Rituals"

 

Heidi Slettedahl is an academic and a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. In her other life, she is President of SUNY Brockport. She lives in western New York with her husband Allan Macpherson and their two unruly Springer Spaniels, Tilly and Rosie. Her most unusual talent is her ability to ride a unicycle. She does less of that now that she is over 50. Her website is here. 

About Mo(u)rning Rituals, by Heidi Slettedahl
This collection of poetry explores the mourning that comes with infertility and other life changes while celebrating and uplifting the opportunities for love. Poems about imagined motherhood and family loss sit alongside poems that explore relationships that thrive across space, outlining the continuum we traverse as we choose to accept others into our lives.

You can read more about Mo(u)rning Rituals on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Mo(u)rning Rituals

My Children

I never got to teach my children anything.
A mass of cells that multiplied
And then did not
No long division
No make believe
 
Except those two weeks, waiting.
 
Each time was harder
And every time I knew.
 

Venice
 
I rarely talk about my babies
Eight in all,
The loss too large for casual conversation.
 
Eight that I am sure of.
Who wants to know of clinics and injections, and odds
you’d never bet on
Until you do.
 
The number might be nine, if I include
The one who left me in Venice
With blood and chills.
 
At least I think he did, if he was there at all.
So hard to know for sure.
 
My friends love Venice,
Return to it year on year.
 
I prefer Verona.
A smaller city, prettier, less crowded.
 
Fewer memories of loss. 

Cathi Rae, "Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems" and "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems"

Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing student Cathi Rae, who has just published two new poetry pamphlets!

Cathi Rae is a poet, spoken word artist and educator. She is currently in the final stages of a practice led/creative PhD at the University of Leicester, where she was also a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing. She has performed throughout the UK, including readings at Womad Festival, The Houses of Commons, Chiltern Arts Festival and many spoken word and poetry events up and down the M1 and M6. She has just published two new pamphlets of poetry with Two Pigeons Press: Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems. You can read about these two new collections and a sample poem from each below.  

About Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, by Cathi Rae
Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems is a pamphlet collection which explores ageing, ageism and how older people navigate the world. It challenges the ageist notions that older people have less validity or become invisible.

From Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems

Just this side of seaworthy

I could be  you
another older woman    our bodies bearing 
one carefully cherished child

just the one
no time to make another
no time to try again

I was akin to you     almost kin to you
recognising this stony skerry
where you stand                washed up
I too have swum these currents

tides that trick and tease
entice you on towards the shore

I feel your           unsteady      steps
across a beach
a beach in name alone
black blasted rock ground down to grey

 
somehow 
I avoided this      this destination    this depression
with frantic paddling     bailing out
keeping my head above the water
watching you and those like you
who submerged beneath the sea 
and emerging
found themselves      sea changed

the boat    the tides    the landing
repeat    repeat        repeat
a life on endless loop
your coracle
just this side of seaworthy
crafted from a faded photograph

gives up the ghost and floats in-land
oars that drop and drift away


your gasping    grasping breath 
presence of pain    still presence of a sort
knocked backwards   you attempt to stand again

fingers clutch at the last remaining 
half remaining    almost-memory  of     croft  wall
grip slipping on moss slick stone
peering out to sea     myopic     in mist that never lifts
cataract-vision 

and on this chain that reaches back
to meet the mainland
I’m standing on another island
larger     the trees a little taller 
hints of green and growth
holding on
hoping     knowing    
that this must pass.

About Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems, by Cathi Rae
Rock, Scissors, Paper and Other Poems is a taster selection from my PhD work, a collection of poems based on conversations and interviews with individuals who shared their lived experience with me.

From Rock, Scissors, Paper and Other Poems

Brick Dust

You tell me about the brick fields 

where red dust earth and red brick dust become impossible to separate 

and paint the little boys in red dust too 

little boys who work for food 

and you tell me what happens to little boys who work for food 

and now I can’t unknow that 

You tell me about the onion factory 

where you peeled skins and were in turn 

unpeeled yourself 

and as we talk I’m crying onion tears 

and I try to keep the sobs inside and silent 

as you too must have done when you were small 

You tell me about the coming here 

boys packed into room too tight 

to house so many bodies 

you sent that hard-earnt money home 

planned triumphant returns full pockets and a sharp new suit 

until one day home was here but never truly here and no longer there 

You tell me about marriage love and madness 

times when you were racked with shame 

but didn’t have the words to name the fears in any language 

but Djiin or ghost seems closest 

the boy you used to be 

still haunts this broken self 

You tell me about love 

your wife become a tree in whose shade you hide 

shelter from a burning sun and later still the British rain 

your children never hungry safe you say and loved 

their lives a world away 

from red dust brick dust onion peeled boys