Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Martin Goodman, "Swimming for England"

Born in Leicester, raised in Loughborough, and then let loose on the wider world, Martin Goodman settled down to become a writer at the age of twelve. It’s the one plan that stuck. Books evolve in his head while others come out in the world. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, sixteen titles take on spiritual journeys, reckonings with ancestral heritage, great lives, eco dramas, and gay themes. Some books win prizes, others win a few readers, and he figures all were worth the years that went into them. See his website here for more. 

About Swimming for England, by Martin Goodman
As a Leicester-based site you’ll probably get my brief pitch: Joe Orton on the Beach.

Faisal arrived in England in a boat of refugees from Calais. This time he’s swimming the Channel.

An English couple wait on the beach. They save lost boys – turning them into real men. Faisal will be their triumph, their first cross-Channel swimmer.

They plan to celebrate. Then out of nowhere Cameron appears. He’s Scottish but black, in smart clothes but with dirty hands. 

Is this another young man they can save? Or has he been digging around in their dark secrets? Now do they have to save themselves?

A chilling examination of English identity, toxic charity, and the violence that can erupt when we don’t get what we want.

You can read more about Swimming for England on the publisher's website here. Below, you can short a short extract from the novel. 

From Swimming for England

That bit about the sea swallowing him up, surely he didn’t mean… ?

Or is this him coming back?

It’s a young man for sure—but he’s not wearing white. He’s not wearing anything; well just a band of the briefest black swimming trunks. Black hair, brown skin, his feet stepping securely on pebbles like they were cushions of moss, walking with such poise, and as he steps free of the mist the daylight catches the wet sheen on him.

Eileen opens wide her arms. "Faisal!" she says.

"Hello Mum."

Faisal kisses Eileen on the cheeks. His lips are cold and he smells of the sea. Her waterproofs crinkle as she wraps her arms about his waist.

"You did it!" It’s hard to speak, her head pressed against the flesh of his chest, his heart beating fast, faster than hers, but she manages it. "Our boy’s a cross-Channel swimmer!"

He presses his hands on her shoulders and levers himself away. It’s not unkind. It’s just that Brian has stepped so close that Eileen’s squeezed off to the side.

"Dad." Faisal wraps his arms around Brian and they do a bear hug. 

Brian laughs that the boy is so wet and his oilies are working. "Go on," he says. "Shake yourself. Like a puppy. I said you would."

Faisal shakes himself. His black hair flicks wide from the wetness of his scalp and droplets rain in a silver shower all around him. Brian and Eileen laugh so Faisal shakes himself again.

There’s a roar. It comes from inside the mist, from the sea, a male bellow that swells like it was going somewhere, an anger set to explode, and then it just stops. They listen for more, and hear just the crash of a wave, and then another.

"What was that?" Faisal asks.

"That’ll be Cameron."

"He’s a young man," Eileen adds. "He’s got a good voice but he can’t swim. I think he’s thrown himself into the sea."

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Boy Who Drew John Lennon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored eighteen books, including the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, New York with Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter. He and Aeronwy Thomas did a poetry reading tour across America in 2008, organised by Stanley H. Barkan, their American publisher. Peter has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, UK), The Royal Literary Fund Award (UK), an Arts Council of Wales Award, the 2016 Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry (UK), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry. His poem "Kilvey Hill" is incorporated into a stained-glass window in Saint Thomas School, Swansea.

Three of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for renowned Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, the Theatre National Du Luxembourg, and the Sofia Opera and Ballet in Bulgaria. 

In April 2014, he was inducted into the Phi Sigma Iota Society at Salem State University, Massachusetts, USA, for his contribution to literature and literary translations. He gave the Guest of Honour speech before his induction.

He tutored English Literature and Creative Writing on the part-time degree programme at Swansea University’s Adult Education Department for twenty-two years, retiring in 2014.  

Further information can be found on his website here. 

Front cover drawing of John Lennon by Peter Thabit Jones ©2026

About The Boy Who Drew John Lennon, by Peter Thabit Jones

The poems range from the poet’s childhood in the shadow of Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, where he was raised by his Welsh grandparents, to his times (2010 to 2025) spent as an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. Other subjects include poems about poets, such as Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, Federico Garcia Lorca, R. S. Thomas, and Welsh language poet Alan Llwyd, artist Stanley Spencer, the jazz and swing music singer Billie Holiday, Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, war, a refugee mother, a victim of domestic abuse, homelessness, widowed women, and the 1926 General Strike in Wales.

You can read more about The Boy Who Drew John Lennon here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From The Boy Who Drew John Lennon

Lassen Volanic Park, California

            (for Patricia and Bill)

We followed the rough path,

Below the mountains

Stretching to a visual heaven

And the wide splinter of a lake

Of greyed placid blue.

We talked as we walked

Above the deep valley of nature,

Like two people who have awoken

In another planet’s landscape:

A landscape that was shaped 

Through a time before mankind’s

Strict calendars and clocks.

A time when volcanoes raged

With eruptions and the land

Slid and moved, broke apart,

Catapulting boulders

In the rising collapse,

Until the agitated storm

Noise of it all settled

Down to a stilled calmness,

Like the silence sleeping

On the glassy face of a pond.

We strolled down to where

The geysers were smoking

From a dulled snow surface

And the strong sniff of sulphur

Fouled the afternoon’s air.

Tourists, we took our photos

To solidify our memories.

Then breathless with hiking

And our excited achievement,

We climbed back to the parked car.

Below, the warm day spread out,

The landscape the physical evidence 

Of this planet’s ever-changing 

Body, its chaos and its creation—

The natural engines of its internal magic.

In the Poetry Class

He left you, you said,             

In the country of tears.           

He left you broken,                  

Your beaten mind                      

A junkyard full                              

Of his angry menace.                

I am your teacher                       

And you told me                         

Last week, when my other         

Students had left.                                   

I glance at you,                                    

Your young hand hovering       

Over the blank sheet                

Of writing paper.                                                       

Do your eyes now sadden    

 

Because of the ugly bruise        

Of your memories,                    

The Jekyll and Hyde                 

Of his so-called love?           

I watch as you                          

Start to scribble                      

Down your gathering thoughts,     

The nervous rivers       

Of blue words claiming       

The clean land of the page,        

As I hope one day                              

You fully claim back your life        

From the prison of pain,      

Claim back the true you      

That his shadows still occupy,      

So that you find the calm       

Rhythm of real caring               

And a happiness unchained  

In the whole of your being.