Merryn Williams (ed.), "Poems for the Year 2020: Eighty Poets on the Pandemic"

About Poems for the Year 2020

Thousands upon thousands of poems were written in the unforgettable year 2020, when
corona virus changed the world. Eighty of the best have been carefully selected for Shoestring's new anthology. They come from all five continents and all corners of Britain, and look from several different angles at the crisis. They are not all about doom and gloom. Sickness, bereavement and isolation are all here, along with empty cities and animals roving the streets, but there are also some very funny and life-enhancing poems about how people are coping in extraordinary times, and intend to come through.

Contributors include: Anon, Mona Arshi, Adrian Barlow, Meg Barton, Denise Bennett, Matt Black, Janine Booth, Alison Brackenbury, Melanie Branton, Carole Bromley, Simone Mansell
Broome, Rip Bulkeley, Maggie Butt, Ian Caws, Gladys Mary Coles, Deborah Cox, Barbara Cumbers, Tony Curtis, Ann Drysdale, Vicki Feaver, Paul Francis, Owen Gallagher, Ann Gray, Paul Groves, Jill Hadfield, Alice Harrison, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Joy Howard, Keith Hutson, Lesley Ingram, Chris Jackson, Rosie Jackson, Mike Jenkins, Roz Kaveney, Angela Kirby, Camilla Lambert, John Lanyon, Gill Learner, Emma Lee, Pippa Little, Marilyn Longstaff, Deborah Maccoby, Mark McDonnell, Gill McEvoy, Jennifer A. McGowan, Anathema Jane McKenna, Alwyn Marriage, Deborah Mason, Kathy Miles, John Mole, Judi Moore, Lucy Newlyn, Patrick Osada, Antony Owen, Harry Owen, M.R. Peacocke, Megan Peel, Clive Perrett, Pauline Prior-Pitt, Rita Ray, Padraig Rooney, Lesley Saunders, Brighid Schroer, Robert Seatter, Clare Shaw, Jay Sizemore, Paul Stephenson, Anne Stewart, Sean Street, Todd Swift, David Tait, Wisty Thomas, Serin Thomasin, Nick Toczek, Christine Vial, John Powell Ward, Merryn Williams, Stephen Wilson, Gregory Woods, Neil Young.

You can see more information on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read about the editor, and two poems from the anthology. 

About the editor

Merryn Williams has published five collections of poetry: the fifth is The Fragile Bridge: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press). Her latest book is Mansfield Park Revisited (Plas Gwyn Books), an updating of Jane Austen's classic. She spent the year 2020 reading literally hundreds of poems about Corona virus and lockdowns. Her website is here.

From Poems for the Year 2020

Threads

          for my son, Silas, NHS anaesthetist and rock-climber

Dangling on a rope

hung from a cliff-top

you look like a tiny spider 

spinning a thread

the slightest gust

could snap. 

Now your patients

are hanging on threads.

And all of you 

working on wards

where a terrible

scissor-wielding hag

decides who to spare,

which thread

next to cut.

Note: the ‘terrible scissor-wielding hag’ is Atropos, eldest of the three Fates.

 - Vicki Feaver, South Lanarkshire

Geoffrey Chaucer Cleans the Beach

Whan the temperature in June is hotte

Than longen folk to doon what they should notte

And specially from every shire’s ende 

Of Engelond to Bournemouthe they wende.

 

Some had woken with the lark

To finde a space where they could parke

Otheres parken everywhere

Legal or not, they did not care

 

And loutes imbiben swich liquor

Of which vertú engendred is the boor

And disputheth eche hir beachside space

And one anothere puncheth in the face

 

Then when al that motley bunch were gonne

Cleanen we the beche anon

And finden underwear and socks

And defecations in a box

 

And so was I seke of hem everichon

That I wrote to my PM anon

To demaunde new laws  straight be doon

But from him answere was there noon.

- Jill Hadfield, New Zealand

David Morley, "FURY"

David Morley, photo © Graeme Oxby

David Morley was trained as an ecologist. He won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His books from Carcanet include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings. David wrote the bestselling The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and teaches at Warwick University. He pioneered podcasting in Creative Writing through his Slow Poetry and Writing Challenges spoken word projects. His book Phoenix New Writing was an anthology of Coventry poetry and won the Raymond Williams Prize. His latest book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best Collection. David is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is a professor of writing at Warwick University and Monash University.

 About FURY

FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer.'

You can read a sample poem from the collection below. You can see more details about FURY on the publisher's website here.

From FURY

Romany Wounds Me

          after George Seferis’s ‘In the Manner of G.S.’
          for Damian Le Bas

Wherever I travel, Romany wounds me.
As I hoved into the horse fair at Stow-on-the-Wold 
between Cotswold chintz shops and the roving road
HGVs hunkered after our wagons on the Fosse Way
cursing us with airbrakes and grunting gearshifts.
At Kenilworth fair, with its tailbacks to Longbridge roundabout,
vardos bottle-necked behind ponies from Pershore, 
rocks rammed on verges of all the villages between
by Neighbourhood Watches with the policeman’s nod.
At Dereham fair I crow-barred the stern stones from the wayside
and flattened fat molehills under my 4 x 4
and snored under the stars of headlights flying across the bypass
and slung the crook of my kettle above an illegal blaze.
At Gressenhall, Swaffham, and Peterborough
the pubs were barred to me.
What do the Gentiles want, these polite people 
who curse us we’re Romanian or worse than? 
A copper pulls us over and barks for passports.
‘Mate, I come from Rotherham,’ laughs one Gypsy,
‘though it’s foreign country round these parts.’
And as we sleep Europe drifts away across the sea.
The cling-net of England closes. Our caravans are ships
with their engines flooded. Our lives are drowning. 
Strange people, the English. They say, ‘this land is ours’
but they don’t rove beyond their commutes or school runs.
Imagine the coppers rocking up at their caravan sites!
Meanwhile, England keeps on travelling, always travelling backwards.
In my dream, our flotilla of caravans sets sail from Dover’s chalk shore
as though the little boats of Dunkirk were our own Gypsy vardos,
as though we were machine-gunned by our own spitfires,
and those brothers on the beach were our own strafed kin,
which we were, when we were borderless and one.
Between the horse fairs of Horsmonden and Appleby 
at all the stopping places when I wake, and in every face I see,
wherever I travel, Romany wounds me.

Stow-on-the-Wold, Kenilworth, Dereham, Horsmonden and Appleby are traditional Traveller horse fairs.

© David Morley, Carcanet Press

Wyl Menmuir, "Fox Fires"

Wyl Menmuir is a novelist, editor and literary consultant based in Cornwall. He is the author of the Man-Booker nominated novel and Observer Best Fiction of the year pick, The Many, and Fox Fires. His short fiction has appeared in Best British Short Stories and he has been published by Nightjar Press, Kneehigh Theatre and the National Trust. He has written for Radio 4’s Open Book, The Guardian and The Observer, and is a regular contributor to the journal Elementum. Born in Stockport in 1979, Wyl now lives in Cornwall with his wife and two children. He is co-creator of the Cornish writing centre, The Writers’ Block, and works with Arvon Foundation, National Literacy Trust and Centre for Literacy in Primary Education on national literacy programmes, as well as Lecturer in Creative Writing at Falmouth University. His website is here.

About Fox Fires

Wren Lithgow has followed her concert pianist mother around the cities of Europe for almost two decades. When they arrive in the mysterious city-state of O, where Wren was conceived during a time of civil war, she resolves to find man she believes is her father.

As the city closes in around her, Wren gives herself over to a place of which she understands nothing, but to which she feels a profound connection, in a story of the watchers and the watched, the ways in which we conceive of home and, finally, the possibility of living on our own terms.

From Fox Fires

Here, you can watch a special reading of the opening scene by twenty novelists, poets and short story writers:

David Wharton, "Finer Things"

David Wharton comes from the North East and lives in Leicester. His novel Finer Things was published by Sandstone Press in 2019. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester, where he is a lecturer in Education Studies. He also teaches Creative Writing for Leicester Vaughan College. Previously, he was an English, Media, and Film Studies teacher. As well as his own fiction and poetry, he has also published books on Film Theory and Media Education. He is currently finishing his second novel. You can find him on Twitter @wharton1965 and his website is here.
 

About Finer Things 

In 1963, a year of sometimes dizzying social and cultural change, the sixties are just about to start swinging. Yorkshire girl Tess is disappointed and isolated at her elite London art school. Her only real friend is Jimmy, a gifted fellow student whose working-class background, homosexuality and uneven mental health make him more of an outsider than she is. One night at a Soho jazz club, they meet Delia, a professional shoplifter from the East End, desperate to disentangle herself from her complicated, dangerous lifestyle. As these three characters are drawn into each other’s worlds, they must all face up to reality, to who they really are, and how they might find unexpected hope in the future. 

From Finer Things

She took Maureen into the Food Halls first. There they strolled past slabs of cured beef; bright tubes of French biscuits; a stack of triangular tinned hams with windmills on their green and red labels – an intoxicating wash of colours and smells. All the other departments had wheeled out the summer stock: swimsuits, thin cotton dresses, lightweight bedding in sharp new season shades. Here it was Christmas all year round: spiced, hedonistic, excessive. 

Delia was sometimes tempted to slip a thing or two from the Food Halls into her bloomers. But there was no point, not when Tommy the Spade could nick the same stuff from any grocer and sell it for pennies. The valuable items – exotic meats, saffron, caviar, truffles – Barkers kept behind the counters, where fussy men in white jackets could dole them out by the quarter ounce. Too much trouble to thieve those in saleable quantities, and anyway, Delia knew the interests of her clientele. Nice clothes you could flog easily but who’d buy shoplifted caviar? As for truffles, she had tried those once, mixed with butter on a cracker, at a party in Knightsbridge. She’d nearly thrown her guts up. For three days afterwards she hadn’t been able to rid herself of the taste of decay.

She picked up an onion, held it to her nose, dislodged some outer skin with her thumbnail, and let a crisp, papery fragment drift to the floor. Returning the vegetable to its display she told Maureen under her breath, ‘We won’t be nicking anything right now. First you’ve to learn how to look out for shopwalkers.’ 

‘I ain’t never been anywhere like this before,’ Maureen said. ‘Spensive, ain’t it?’ 

‘Overpriced for idiots. The sort who’ll cough up double for digestive biscuits so they can take them home in a paper bag with Barkers of Kensington on it. Did you hear what I said about shopwalkers?’

Maureen nodded. ‘I got to learn how to look out for them.’ 

‘Good. Over there, by the fresh herbs,’ Delia murmured. ‘Blue coat. Just take a quick look. Tell me what you think.’ 

Maureen glanced at the woman clumsily, but briefly enough. 

‘Shopwalker?’ 

‘Don’t think so. But what do you notice about her? Why doesn’t she fit in here?’ 

The apprentice gave the blue-coated woman another awkward look. ‘Clothes?’

‘Well done. What’s wrong with them?’

‘Too cheap.’

‘That’s right. Now keep an eye on her.’ 

Delia herself was dressed in items lifted from the best clothing departments in the city, and, because Stella had prepared her for the day’s work, so was Maureen. Nothing flashy, but all high quality. Unlike the shoplifters they pursued, shopwalkers had to buy their own clothes, and they weren't paid well. They prowled about the stores in dumpy crap from Marks and Spencer, giving the alarm to any hoister who knew her business. But this woman’s tat came from British Home Stores, or somewhere worse. She was a shoplifter. Some amateur.

Gaynor Jones, "Among These Animals"

Gaynor Jones is a writer based in Oldham. She is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writer’s Award for her short story collection in progress, Girls Who Get Taken & Other Stories. She has won or been placed in writing competitions including the Bridport Prize for flash fiction, the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She has performed her work at spoken word nights in the North West and at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe with For Book’s Sake. Her website is here. 

About Among These Animals 

Among These Animals is a novella-in-flash that traces the lives of farmer Derfel and his daughter Carys from the 1950s onwards in North Wales. An experimental take on a traditional historical saga, the hybrid form of the book reflects the themes within: this is a story about how family can break us, but can also put us back together again. 

You can see more details about Among These Animals on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample from it. 

From Among These Animals

Yolk 

The letters are carved like a secret. The base of the thick tree trunk at the entrance to the farm now bears her name forever. It will stretch and grow with the tree, the letters reaching skyward, growing as the boy who carved it grows, until the leaves reach the clouds and she is nothing but a memory. 

Owain had tried to climb the tree but Carys shooed him away. She can hear him bashing stones together at the top of the drive. She wants to be alone to feel the carving under her fingers, to imagine the hand behind it. 

Carys does not know which farmhand it was; it could be any of them. She has heard them whispering about her as she passes in the yard in her summer shorts. She could stop and join in with them, could watch their cheeks turn crimson as she leans over to roll a marble or toss a jack, but she is not interested in such games. Instead she roams the fields after school, shirking her work, beheading dandelions that have no right to be growing there anyway, looking for the young man with the dark eyes and the scarred arm. Lately he lingers when he drops off the keys after his work, taking warm cups of tea or slices of honeyed toast, whatever her mother offers. 

Carys is leaning down in the late autumn sun, tracing the letters of her own name, when she feels the body behind her. A hand moves onto hers, the sleeves rolled up above it just enough to show the criss-cross pattern of wire in flesh. The hand flattens out her own until it covers the carved letters, and a voice whispers her own name into her ear. She feels a peck-peck-pecking low down in her groin as though there is an egg in there, something trying to get out. When he turns her around and presses his mouth onto hers, the egg bursts open, and it isn’t a bird in there, but the white, and the yolk, viscous and warm, flooding her body. 

Her eyes are closed. She is gone. She doesn’t hear Owain drop his stones. She doesn’t see him run towards the fields. She doesn’t feel the rain, thick and heavy, falling onto her skin. 

Carys arrives home to her mother cracking eggs into a pan for the morning batter. The shells pile up, jagged edges slotting into each other imperfectly. The twins are in their pyjamas, tearing at pages in a comic book. Carys grabs a towel and rubs at her hair. Her father looks up at her and then up at the clock, and then back at her. Carys drops the towel and keeps her hands at her side, refusing to flatten down her skirt or check her arms for tiny scratches from the tree. 

‘Come on now, boys. Let’s get you to bed.’ 

She looks back over her shoulder at her father at the kitchen table, rolling an egg in his hand. He is moving it gently, as if he knows how easily it might be broken. 

Anna Vaught, "Red Flags and Green Flags in Publishing"

By Anna Vaught

Having spoken to all the wonderful MA Creative Writing students at Leicester the other week, I thought I would answer a question here that folks were keen to ask, in case my answers are helpful or interesting to anyone contemplating publication, or wondering about the route they are already on. 

So my fifth book is just going out on submission and I am editing my sixth and seventh. I know the indie presses but I am agented for future work. Thus, I've a range of experience. I was asked what, for me, were red or green flags when you are offered publication by an indie press or representation by an agent. This is what I said based on my experience and working closely with others. As you can probably tell, many different things happen to people! So here we go with the red flags:

1. When there’s no dialogue offered or you try to open up dialogue and find it’s not possible, it ought to be a warning sign, because you have to be able to understand what is happening. I had a publication date change three times without my being told. That sort of thing. You shouldn't have to go through this.

2. If you can’t get answers to key questions, then that's a red flag - questions that seem key to you, that is. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about schedule, publicity and so on. This is art, but it is also commerce.  

3. Do some looking about. Do you see that there’s little parity (in terms of exposure) between the publisher's or agent's authors / clients when you look at social media feed and elsewhere? Of course it won’t be totally consistent and I don’t see how it can be, but probe and research if some authors are invisible.  

4. If it is a small press, check that at least some of their back catalogue is available. If it is not, try to find out why. Because at some point you will be back catalogue. If you are published and then forgotten about, that would be sad. Also, it should give you pause.

5. Oh - this might be contentious, but I think referring to a business relationship in terms of your being part of a cohort or a family can be problematic because, while you’re united by your love of books, it suggests a blurring of lines somewhere ... and that might not be to your advantage in terms of commerce, because the connection has become too emotional. Also, it might be a highway to exploitative behaviour. 

6. If the person or publisher you've been offered a contract with is frequently and vocally critical of other parts of the publishing industry - say on Twitter - I think that's a warning light. I DO NOT mean those great folk aiming to improve diversity and make sure all voices are heard; I mean those who criticise agents, big publishers, other publishers. It may mean fewer options and choices for you as a writer because some avenues are closed off. 

7. With an agent or a publisher, make sure there is a good contract and that it is explained to you. If it isn't or any concerns are waved away, I'd be very wary. Also, on this topic, get any contract vetted by The Society of Authors and also let me pass on that it is my understanding that, unless you get a multi-book deal, an insistence from a publisher that they have first dibs on your second book with them is not as clear cut as some writers have believed - even if it is in your contract. You have the right to negotiate here and that includes not publishing the book. 

... Green flags? Everything that's the opposite of all this! 

About the author
Anna Vaught is a novelist, poet, essayist, short fiction writer, editor and a secondary English teacher, tutor and mentor, mental health advocate and mum of 3. 2020 saw the publication of Anna's third novel, Saving Lucia (Bluemoose), which has been longlisted for the Barbellion Prize, and a first short story collection, Famished (Influx). Anglo-Welsh, she splits her time between Wiltshire, Wales, and the Southern US. She is currently finishing a new novel and working on some non-fiction, while a further novel and second short story collection are on the desk. Anna’s essays, reviews, articles, and features have been featured widely online and in print. She is represented by Kate Johnson of Mackenzie Wolf Literary Agents, in New York City. Her website is here. She is also on Twitter @BookwormVaught and Instagram @bookwormvaught6. 

Anna gave a masterclass at the University of Leicester as part of the MA in Creative Writing in March 2021. You can read about her novel Saving Lucia on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Astro-Poetry Competition 2021: The Results and the Poems

As part of the second-year module, Using Stories, we explore some of the ways in which Creative Writing might draw on and explore scientific material. This includes, for example, looking at some of the amazing discoveries by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and using them as starting points for new poems. 

Arising from this, we ran a competition in early 2021, open to all Creative Writing students at the University of Leicester, in which they were asked to submit poems inspired, in some way, by Chandra's findings. You can see the original call for submissions and description of the competition here.

The entries we received were all, in their different ways, wonderful explorations of the fascinating interconnections between Creative Writing and science. It was naturally very hard to select winners and runners-up; but we chose two winners and two 'honourable mentions.' Congratulations to all four writers, and thank you to everyone who submitted poems for the competition.

Here are the results:

Winners

There were two joint winning poems: ‘IC 4593’ by Laura Sygrove, and ‘A New Cosmic Triad of Sound’ by Rebecca Hughes. You can read these poems on NASA Chandra X-Ray's website here.

Honourable Mentions

There were two 'Honourable Mentions': 'A Matter of Life Span' by Lena Elin Jetses, and 'Infant Star' by Isaac Plant. You can read these poems below. 

Lena Elin Jetses is a twenty-year-old English student at the University of Leipzig in Germany, on an exchange at the University of Leicester. She enjoys writing fantasy novels and short stories, preferably at 4am and fuelled by alternative rock music, tea and chocolate. She writes: 'For this poem, the idea was to capture the enthusiasm of scientists trying to understand as much about space as possible. What struck me about the original article ('Oldest Known Objects Are Surprisingly Immature') was the fascination with the fact that age does not equal evolutionary stage for globular clusters. It puts being human beings' lifetime into perspective, and that is what I tried to convey.'

NASA/CXC/Northwestern/ J. Fregeau

A Matter of Life Span

All grown-up and ready to explore, 
humanity jumps straight out of college
into space, the final frontier.
Right outside our earthly door
we hope to find ancient knowledge
in globular clusters far and near.

Those clusters serve as laboratories
where we study on and on
about stars a million times our ages.
As we count x-ray binaries,
we hearken to expert Fregeau, John,
who names the evolutionary stages.

Meanwhile in the Milky Way
those giants waste billions of years away.
Their celestial nurseries
can be found in all galaxies.
We strive to find answers, we strive to be sure;
yet in 9 billion years they never mature.

Isaac Plant is a second-year English student from the north east. He writes: 'The article I read on the formation of protostars ('X-Rays from a Newborn Star Hint at our Sun's Earliest Days') didn't just provide interesting language as part of a found poetry task we did in class, but also contained an interesting analogy for growth. I found the image of this inward collapse and possible destruction being a necessary part of the star's evolution an interesting parallel to concepts of personal growth in which one must risk destroying parts of one's old self to become something new.'

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Aix-Marseille University/N. Grosso et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Infant Star

Young protostar, beautiful nebula,
Blackhole iris, spiralling disks obscure,
Sending waves, a solar tributary,
Aeons of cosmic flooding to endure,
Conceived in molecular cloud complex,
Solar systems past, broken and reborn,
Atomic mapping joyfully undone,
Universal tapestry newly torn,
Long-awaited stellar evolution,
Light piercing cocoon of dust and gas,
Metamorphosis of millennia,
Stalwart heart of light or glimmer to pass,
A break of the celestial at last,
Life-giving host star or unyielding vast.