Milena Williamson, "Milk & Moon-water"

 

Milena Williamson, photo by Stephanie Sy-Quia

Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became Milk & Moon-water.

About Milk & Moon-water

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever. 

In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader. 

Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and re-engages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

You can read more about Milk & Moon-water on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Milk & Moon-water

Charm for Unfruitful Land (Remixed)

The good news is the wolves have returned to Europe.

   The bad news is people are killing wolves again. I own no

underwear from this island. There is no purely wild place left

   on this island. I buy wildflower seeds from the dark web.

I walk on the earth while there is still time and sprinkle seeds

   on riverbanks, lawns and graveyards. The smoke pours

across borders and becomes the sky. It’s time to buy an air filter

   and give it a name. I am stuck inside a well and Europe

is the silver bucket framed against the sky. We are living

   in the overlap. We can create clouds from seawater.

We drilled into Antarctica to find the most transparent ice.

   This ice is compressed by other ice so it’s dark down there,

dark enough to see neutrinos belly-flop into light.

 

Journey Charm (Remixed)

With eight lanes on the upper

and six lanes on the lower,

the busiest bridge in the world

is a sonnet. Love, we are suspended

in steel between the river and the sky.

Manhattan and a flood warning

is a good backdrop for listing everything

that has spilled on the GW Bridge –

gas and manure and watermelon

and frozen chicken. Upper or lower?

A man once landed a plane here

and survived. Now there’s a woman

on the median selling fresh oranges.

We see the signs. The lanes divide.

Apryl Skies, "Elements & Angels"

Apryl Skies is a California native, an award-winning author, filmmaker, and founder of Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House. Skies’ writing is highly aesthetic, lyrical and provocative. She now resides among the ancient saguaros, colourful street art and opulent monsoon skies of Tucson AZ.

About Elements & Angels, by Apryl Skies
Elements & Angels is a wildly imaginative collection of poetry by award-winning author, Apryl Skies. Like snapshots capturing memories, past lives, Skies draws a full spectrum of emotion from each sacred moment, moulding them into cinematic poems, dramatic recollections and gritty vignettes. Skies navigates her way through an uncertain world recognizing the magic of the mundane. These poems are time capsules and the messages within overflow with thought-provoking metaphor. Long-awaited and epic in scale this collection reads like a survivor anthem.

From Elements & Angels

Poems inspired by Los Angeles

LosT Angeles

City to cinders
Buried beneath soot and ash
Paradise wounded

Fire at the Midnight Matinee

The entire southern California coast
bursts into flame

Radioactive egos tread water
exploding into a sea of cinder

centerfolds and cardboard cut-outs 
with their manufactured smiles, 
flailing arms, and yoga mats
rush toward a painted 
Hollywood horizon 
scraping the gum from their heels.

Ushers rip perforated tickets,
viewers take their seats
awaiting the next Black Dahlia

Mouths agape
full of popcorn
and imitation butter.

Poems inspired by Tucson

Tucson Landscape

Mai tai sunset sky
Over desert horizon
Coyote and moon


Oracle Starlings

Starlings in flight 
their peculiar formations 
mingle with the ghosts
above the cemetery on Oracle Road

a choreographed birdsong,
a dance with the dead
at twilight

here on Oracle road
the sun sinks
beneath the Tucson landscape
into the shadows of ancient Saguaros

where no one is less alive 
than the living

115 Degrees Fahrenheit 

I tickle Mexico 
to return to you
across desert horizons 
of saguaros and mesquite
miles rippled with heat
trundling onto this tired highway, 
my bridge back home …

And I could not love you more
as I lean heavy into your indifference,
once my soft place to land
now a shattered citadel 
of infinite distances

And those raw truths 
that continue to burn and consume
our existence, and each of these
haunting stars above
revealing all our unremarkable postures

How very foolish we are 
to think any one of us 
worthy of crown.

Cathy Galvin, "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara"

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose poetry collection Ethnology has just been published by Bloodaxe Books!

Cathy Galvin's debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland. She has published three previous pamphlets of poetry, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (2019). She is widely published as a poet and short story writer and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. As a journalist she has worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and the Sunday Times. She founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the short story organisation, the Word Factory. She is the editor of Red, an anthology of new writing published by Waterstones. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester and lives near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

About Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, by Cathy Galvin
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language and creates a dialogue with the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agenda. Loss, and loss of a mother tongue, are carefully explored. 

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

From Ethnology

Walls

There’s no anvil, brooch, harrow-pin.

The currach’s broken, walls stand without a roof.

All that’s left: a bureau containing bills,

cards, scarves, a Will.

You’re not in view but I can hear a breath

– the well-made dress and phrase.

My made things broke long ago.

They had little purchase on this world.

The creed, letters I do not read.

Solid seem the things that slip away.

Leaving us bone.

We stake a claim, lay foundations,

build and watch it fall.

Within, the comforts that ease survival.

We cut back wilderness, tame, contain

sycamore, birch, bramble, willow, grass.

All return.

Our walls come down, consolations go.

We do not come back. Take away it all

and what is left is who we are.

Our homes are built to go. 

Coventry Carol

You did not sing in Irish or in English.

Never told me what the English did to your people,

were clear you did not want an Irish husband,

someone who might sing sweetly and leave his wife behind,

become a father like yours who did not feed his own children.

When the Irish began bombing Birmingham,

and a shopkeeper refused to serve me in my Catholic

school uniform, your silence filled my mouth.

Karuna Mistry, "You-me-verse-all Hueman"

Karuna Mistry is a British writer of Indian ethnicity and works at the University of Leicester. He has published over 100 individual poems in more than 70 anthologies. Between his two poetry book releases, Karuna has been a poetry editor for an online magazine. As well as poetry, his creativity includes blogging and drawing – his illustrations appear in both of his books. You can connect with Karuna via his website or Facebook / Instagram: @karunamistrypoetry. You can read about his previous book, Sojourn, written with Pratibha Savani, on Creative at Leicester here. 

About You-me-verse-all Hueman, by Karuna Mistry
You-me-verse-all Hueman captures humanity in its plurality – age, gender, race, sexuality, sociality and spirituality. Follow humanity’s pursuit of happiness through past, present and future in this epic journey. A variety of themes and recurring subtleties build through the chapters, culminating in a sublime climax. The book contains 120 poems across time and space, 40 digital images, 30 illustrations, as well as 4 essays. You can read more about the book here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From You-me-verse-all Hueman

LJ Ireton, "Unclaimed"

LJ Ireton is a poet and a bookseller from London. She has a 1st Class B.A. Honours in English Language and Literature. Her poems have been published by over forty journals both in print and online, including: Green Ink Poetry, The Madrigal, Humana Obscura, Spellbinder Literary Magazine, Drawn to the Light, Acropolis Journal, Amphibian Literary Journal, Tiny Seed Journal, Black Bough, Spelt and Wild Greens Magazine. Her poetry features in the printed anthologies Spectrum (Renard Press, 2022), York Literary Review 2023 (Valley Press), Building Bridges (Renard Press, 2024), You’re Never Too Much (Macmillan, 2025) and on the BBC World Service Bookclub. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons from the Sky, was published by Ellipsis Imprints in February 2024, followed by Interlude in February 2025 by Haywood Books.

About Unclaimed, by LJ Ireton

These are lyrical, first person poems, which give voices to the bold and spirited Tudor and Stuart queens judged and condemned by history: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Mary, Queen of Scots.

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

From Unclaimed

Scotland 

          Mary, Queen of Scots

It was there. Hidden,
sleeping in my young soul
while I was scorning rocks
on curated tile.

I am awake now, and turning;
wild heather scales my bones, 
shedding my skin –
I was schooled in everything but
how earth-gold would respond
to my step 
returning,
humming at my feet —

my mourning veil
curls in the wildflowers;
they are reclaiming it
with teeth,
thistle purple sharp ghosts
arise,
my lungs smoke mist
moors and heights —

Scots King am I;
brocade and pearl
re-learning the beauty of thorns.

Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Laura Besley, "sum of her PARTS"

Congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester PhD student and MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press!

Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club - a monthly online book club wherein participants read & discuss novellas-in-flash. Currently, she is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her website is here.    

About sum of her PARTS, by Laura Besley
sum of her PARTS is a collection of 30 micro pieces, each exactly 50 words with a one-word title. They explore female body parts and how they are used and abused by those around them, as well as celebrated.  

You can read more about sum of her PARTS on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample pieces from the collection. 

From sum of her PARTS

solitary

most days
I like
living alone, 
no one 
to moan
about my
lack of 
culinary skills
or clothes
strewn around; 
only when 
a robin - 
breast aglow - 
frolics in 
a birdbath
or I
almost choke
on a 
piece of 
molten cheese
on toast
do I 
regret certain 
decisions made
long ago.

bold

It's an hour before sunrise when I wake and discover I've turned into a trombone, my body shiny-sleek. I try out my new mouthpiece, a short shy toot at first. Subsequent blows grow in length and volume until I am blaring, brass-band loud. This is my voice. Hear me. Listen. 

Tina Cole & Michael W. Thomas, "Nothing Louche or Bohemian"

Tina Cole was born in the Black Country and now lives in rural Herefordshire near Ludlow. She has three published pamphlets, I Almost Knew You (2018), Forged (Yaffle Press, 2021) and What it Was (Mark Time Books, 2023). As a poet and reviewer, she has led workshops with both adults and children and judged a number of U.K. and international competitions. Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines and collections, including in The Guardian newspaper. She is a past winner of a number of national poetry competitions, 2010-2023, and completed an M.A. in Creative Writing / Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023.

Michael W. Thomas has published ten collections of poetry, three novels and two collections of short fiction. His most recent poetry collection, prior to this, is A Time for Such a Word (Black Pear Press); his most recent short fiction collection is Sing Ho! Stout Cortez: Novellas and Stories (Black Pear Press); his most recent novel is The Erkeley Shadows (KDP / Swan Village Reporter). With Simon Fletcher, he edited The Poetry of Worcestershire (Offa's Press). His work has appeared in Acumen, The Antigonish Review (Canada), The Antioch Review (US), The Cannon's Mouth, Critical Survey, Crossroads (Poland), Dream Catcher, Etchings (Australia), Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, Magazine Six (US), Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Under the Radar, among others. He has reviewed for The London Magazine, Other Poetry and The Times Literary Supplement, and is on the editorial board of Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies (University of Bialystok, Poland). He was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition, 2020 and 2022, and long-listed and short-listed for the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize, 2023. Michael's website is here. He blogs here. @thomasmichaelw

About Nothing Louche or Bohemian, by Tina Cole and Michael W. Thomas
A miscellany box of memories, intense and disconcerting; a gently encouraging piano teacher; teddy bears that knew better days; tinkling bottle-tags; classroom faces happy, wistful, preoccupied; a district nurse’s long-ago phone call; an assignation beneath a canal bridge; a father’s jokes worn down to the metal. These and so many other scenes find their places in the landscape of Nothing Louche or Bohemian. As the collection unfolds, threads are caught, drawn out, found to be markers on the map of what once was—and what, in these pages, lives again … enthralling, troubling, never less than vivid. Tina and Michael have known each other for several years but discovered that they’d grown up in the same area of the Black Country – and gone to the same secondary school. Those coincidences prompted Tina to suggest that they collaborate on a project. This is it.  

From Nothing Louche or Bohemian

Intoxication

It's all in the way you look at things 

or so they say. I remember them being purchased 

in a junk shop just behind The Miners Arms.

My hand went out instinctively to three silver

bottle tags, fingers tracing the engraving, whisky, 

gin, vermouth, how they glinted in the forty-watt 

light amongst tarnished soup tureens and discarded 

cutlery, but oh, that word    vermouth! 

                          It was evenings in cerise silk pyjamas, 

something louche, bohemian, a life away from corseted 

cares. Listening to Rachmaninov, nights at the Royal Opera 

not the sixpenny stalls at the Sedgley Clifton. No, the life 

I deserved sitting in a green Lloyd-loom chair, wafting 

about a Hampstead flat thin and mysterious, smoking

something sweetly scented. I would have written 

a clutch of acclaimed collections, beautiful poetry

not the usual tat that is continually rejected. 

                          It's all in the way you look at things, 

in the way one's hand reaches out for beauty,

a rose, a baby's hand, a moment of success, 

and that word vermouth    is still    intoxicating. 

- Tina Cole

Jacqueline Burnett

           Holy Trinity Roman Catholic School, Oxford Street, Bilston, 1958-1965

We were in the same class

at primary school. Shared 

the same birthday. One year

were told to stand up

so the room could sing

and toast the nothing we'd done.

Slight, she was, freckled:

tawny keeps coming to mind.

Already bringing on a bit of a stoop

to oblige the future.

You'd glimpse her 

slipping out to play,

edging the shadows

of the manager's son

and the town-clerk's daughter.

She answered each question perfectly

then retrieved her stillness,

putting the world away from her

till called upon again.

She rarely smiled,

perhaps never,

certainly not the day she and I

held an end apiece of coincidence,

like a pageant-flag

golden from a brush of sun

fluttered in a pocket of wind.

- Michael W. Thomas

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

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. 

Caroline Gill, "Driftwood by Starlight"

Caroline Gill lives in Suffolk with her archaeologist husband, David. Her first full poetry collection, Driftwood by Starlight, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press in 2021. Caroline graduated in Classical Studies from Newcastle University in 1982, and gained a PGCE from the University of Exeter, followed by a TEFL Certificate from the Bell School of Languages in Norwich. She has worked as a teacher, an EFL tutor, and a Cataloguing Assistant in the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. 

The Holy Place, a ‘Poet to Poet’ chapbook shared with Monterey-based poet, John Dotson, was published by The Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) in conjunction with Cross-Cultural Communications (New York). The Holy Place was launched in 2012 at the Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea. ‘The Figure at the Phoenix Mine,’ a sestina, was awarded First Prize in the General Section of the International Petra Kenney Poetry Competition (2007). ‘Raft Race’ took Overall First Prize in the ZSL ‘Conservation’ Poetry Competition (2014). ‘Penwith Fingerstone’ was awarded Third Prize in the Milestones Competition (2017), judged by Brian Patten. Three poems were included in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms by Lewis Putnam Turco (4th edition, University Press of New England, 2012). 

Caroline has read her poems at the Hay Festival, the First International Poetry Festival in Swansea, Poetry in Aldeburgh and Winchester Poetry Festival. She has taken part in several short writing courses, including one run jointly in 2014 by the Poetry School and the Polar Museum (SPRI, University of Cambridge). Another, The Write Stuff, was organised by Disability Arts Cymru. Caroline’s outlook is shaped by her Christian faith. She loves to watch puffins, and many of her poems reflect her concern for the planet. 

Caroline's website is here. 

About Driftwood by Starlight

Driftwood by Starlight by Caroline Gill was published by Peter Thabit Jones of The Seventh Quarry Press in June 2021. While many of the poems have a coastal theme, some concern wildlife, landscape and archaeology. The majority have settings in England, Scotland and Wales. The author has a life-long love of Cornwall; the cover photograph, showing Cadgwith Cove under moon and stars, was taken by Laurence Hartwell. 

You can read a review of Driftwood by Starlight on Everybody's Reviewing here. You can read an interview with Caroline Gill about the collection on her blog here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From Driftwood by Starlight, by Caroline Gill

Penwith Fingerstone

           SW437374, Treen, beside B3306

Zennor Quoit, Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn
and Gurnard’s Head ripple off the tongue,
raining their music on this granite land.

I tilt my neck and watch the sky display
its spectral colours as the clouds recede;
two farm dogs scamper up the hill. I walk

towards the fingerstone, which hides
between the tarmac and a Cornish hedge;
a snail trail shimmers in the afternoon.

I check the surface of the milestone block.
A hand points to Penzance: it’s ‘6M’ up
and over to the arc around Mount’s Bay.

This ‘stone with benchmark’ sends me on
to find a town called ‘ƧTIVƧ’, without an ‘e’
in Ives. Each ‘S’ is back to front: was this

through lack of learning? It could be
the maker was left-handed for when I
was small and shaping letters into words,

my text ran right to left, which seemed
its natural ebb and flow. I filled the pages
of my stapled book, flicking from the end,

until convention’s channels turned the tide.
My current ‘S’ advances in a coil of surf,
unlike these stone-based characters,

which chime when rain comes pelting
down: Gurnard’s Head, Zennor Quoit,
Robin’s Rocks, Great Zawn …

The Ceilidh House

The peat fire crackles and burns with stories;
footsteps scurry through mist and mountain
to warm a Hebridean hearth with stories.

A figure crosses turf where St Columba
knelt long ago beside the Snizort;
the crofter’s creel is laden with stories.

He pauses to watch the snow-stars drifting
on the loch, with its kelp and pebbles;
hares in the lazy-bed leap with stories.

The crofter enters his neighbour’s parlour,
rests on the settle while divots smoulder;
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.

Shadows dance round the doleful piper,
whose music makes the embers tremble;
the single oil lamp flickers with stories.

A mother stirs her three-legged cauldron;
sisters spin, or weave at the handloom,
infusing a homemade plaid with stories.

Hailstone tears pound the snow-flecked Cuillin,
recalling the Clearances, emigration:
the Ceilidh House overflows with stories.