This episode features an interview with Ruba Abughaida who is part Palestinian, part Lebanese. Her poems reflect the struggles of the Palestinians and of the peoples of the Middle East more generally. In addition to her own poetry, in English and Arabic, and her fiction, she is a notable translator of Arabic poetry, and, in particular, with Jenny Lewis, of the Iraqi poet, Adnan al Sayegh.
Struggle seemed an appropriate theme for this episode and the poems included here deal with public and private struggles of many different kinds. Poems included come from Lizzie Ballagher, Fiona Perry, Guy Jones, Alison Jones, Elizabeth Barton, Sarah J Bryson, Helen Overell and Kate Young.
The episode closes with a short reading by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs from his new collection, Identified Flying Objects.
Ruba Abughaida reads three of her own poems: '36 Abbas Street' has been published in Paths and Passageways (Albion Beatnik), 'Things we Need to Witness' has been put onto Soundcloud by Malcolm Atkins with accompanying music by Malcolm, and 'Twelve Tones from Yemen to Palestine' has not yet been published.
She also read poems by Adonis, al-Mutanabbi and Fadwa Tuqan. The translation of Adonis’ poem that she read called 'The Passage' has been translated by her from Arabic.
Her book, cover shown below, is published in English and Arabic by AlbionBeatnik Press but I wish you better luck in negotiating their website than I had. If any publishers are reading or listening, this book seriously needs to be reissued.
Ruba Abughaida is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer and translator. She received her undergraduate degree in Canada followed by an Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford University, an MSt. in Creative Writing from Cambridge University and an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS University. She won the Writers and Artists Historical Fiction Award (2014) for her short story ‘The Sirocco Winds’, and published the poetry pamphlet Paths and Passageways (Albion Beatnik Press) in 2018. Her writing, including short stories, poetry and reviews have appeared in several publications in the UK, North America and Lebanon. She has translated work by critically acclaimed poets from the Arab world and the UK. Her work with Adnan Al-Sayegh and Jenny Lewis includes Let Me Tell You What I Saw, extracts from Adnan’s monumental anti-war poem, Uruk’s Anthem, (Seren, 2020); Jenny’s Even at the Edge of the World (Dar Sutour and Dar Al-Rafidain, 2018); Who Can Climb the Sky (2016), a theatre piece performed at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the Enheduanna Festival, Malmö, Sweden (2016/ 2017); Taking Mesopotamia by Jenny Lewis(Oxford Poets/Carcanet 2014); and Singing for Inanna, by Jenny Lewis and Adnan Al-Sayegh, (Mulfran Press, 2014). Her latest Arabic collection of poetry, The Forgotten Queens, is forthcoming in April 2024 (Beesan Press). https://rubaabughaida.com |
Lizzie Ballagher
Limestone Pavement – Malham Cove
The rift tipped it, seafloor once, ripped
rock in steepest upheaval:
tilted it back over the shale & slate & sandstone
it had stood upon for aeons.
When continents clashed,
it was exposed. Reared up,
left sparse: spare cliff
in a landlocked place.
Now it is drained dry:
some might say barren—
clints faulted, fissured by time,
by ice, by terminal moraine,
by roaring water pouring
for generations
across its fractured face—
savage, sweeping erosion.
Be mindful where you place your feet
on the treachery of those break-back slabs.
Pause. Stop to look into grykes
where you may perhaps solve mysteries.
Here, the limestone bones’ drought holds
lush ferns, diminutive pansies & violets,
wood anemones fragile as spring itself
in chinks and desert clefts.
Rain falls steadily and forever down:
assumes chalk-white cloudiness; drips
like milk between these stones. The cove
belongs in another age—has never chosen this.
The creation of Malham Cove came about when two pro-continents (which geologists have named Laurussia and Gondwana) were rammed together by seismic upheavals that took place roughly 350 million years ago along massive tears in the Earth’s crust during the Carboniferous Era.
Perhaps I never left you
‘Dirty Old Town’, sang Ewan MacColl,
conjuring you from my memory, Doire*:
oak-tree place in Ireland, Derry.
Your fortress walls were built of Derry schist,
with attitudes as hard-line as your very stones,
while waterside cranes scissored
over the oily lough, the docks;
while coal-smoke overhung
grimed sandbags, gritty streets;
while soldiers slouched from barracks.
Yes, even now on summer
festival days in England
when open pub-doors spill out drunks,
arms linked, all singing into the street;
when the rolling fug of booze & fags
follows them out—they make me
think of you, old hard-edged Derry.
And seagulls: screeching & shrieking,
cruising westerlies high over Lough Foyle—
they’re with me wherever I go now—
their splatter on pavements and cars,
their beady-eyed spying from roof-ridges
or the tops of walls graffitied
with angry slogans, twisted histories.
But, oh, Derry, on spring nights just
two miles away across the Border,
in blackthorn lanes under gleaming metal stars
and the soft dark smudge of mountains,
there it was in the Donegal lift & lilt of fiddle-bows
that you beguiled me, called to me from blue-hazed inns
where your love-songs came hunting for my heart.
Though I left you long ago, Derry, I realise,
when I hear those songs—the wild lament of fiddles—
that you, heart of the oak tree, have never left me.
* The Irish Gaelic word ‘doire’, pronounced ‘derry’, means ‘oak tree’.
Lizzie Ballagher's focus is on landscapes, both interior and exterior; also on the beauty (and hostility) of the natural world. Having studied in England, Ireland, and the USA, she worked in education and publishing. Her poems have appeared in print and online in all corners of the English-speaking world. Find her blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/ |
Fiona Perry
Every War is an Apocalypse
for Anne Maguire
after Timothy Yu
Show us ravaged Belfast.
We want to see the soaring yellow giants
tangi rumbling through its streets
graffiti pleas for justice splashed on gable walls
wild bonfires eating up the night.
Inform us of your people’s sorrows-
we wish to know about their prisoner son
their father, killed in a car bomb
their disappeared grandmother
their suffering saints trapped in plaster.
And now to that fateful day.
We have analysed the footage-
over and over again, reliving the scene.
With heavy hearts, we observed
your children move beside you
contained within your mother-orbit
as a treachery of serpents circled above.
We have established our facts.
The crown was ripped
from your head
your stars scattered
across the pavement
the sun was blotted out.
With this, we are closing our case files.
Rage is a fortress that must be dismantled.
We will sweep up the splintered glass
remove the wrecked car
junior bicycle
pram.
And outside the mangled church
railings, we will raise up a shrine.
Please know, our intercessions
flow through Riverdale.
Soon you will be taken to a safe
house, where peace resides,
a place where galaxies of lost
families are known to reconvene.
Fiona Perry mines memory, mythology, family stories, allegory, dreams, and most recently, scientific discovery to create poetry and short fiction. Her written work features in print journals including Lighthouse, The Alchemy Spoon, Skylight47, and Into The Void. They also appear online in Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Blue Nib, Utopia and Abyss & Apex. She has previsously contributed poems to the “Poetry Worth Hearing” podcast. Fiona’s first collection of poetry, Alchemy (Turas Press, Dublin), won the Poetry Book Awards (2021) Silver Medal and was shortlisted for the Rubery Prize. Her flash fiction, Sea Change, won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards (2020). |
Guy Jones
Not Just for Christmas
You can blame it on the force nine
of economic variables
forever making unforecast landfall
though to be fair
the signs were there in the isobars
from the last time
one came to blow our homes away
You can blame it on those who bluster out
loaded figures showing
just for the record
that funding is up
to support/prevent
yet still jetsam gathers in doorways
and the barometer swings in the same old direction
You may even blame it on the victims
you won't be the last
You can blame on who you like
it only happens to 'other people'
after all
there is no such thing as bad weather
just unfortunate clothing
So
collar up against the prevailing
you pass another one
wrapped in shabby unfortunateness
hunkering down below the dew point
asleep? off his face? worse?
and you hold off the nagging thought
"I'm only a pay cheque away"
Time
The first second afterward hung
like the ring of a bell
clear and alive in the air
That is the way it is
One second passes away
and with its chime still clinging
the next one lies down on top
like the pages of a book
and makes its own demands
Slowly like this
one second on another
a minute passed
The first minute was calm
The second full of regrets
The third of guilt
and then of 'why?'
By the end of the first hour
a week had passed
and still the kettle for the doctor's tea had not boiled
nor the ambulance arrived
The doctor made a phone call
He would be late for tea
maybe an hour or so
“Love you and the kids”
Life goes on
one second on another
one moment exchanged
but nothing really changed
as though one minute is no different from the next
as though all seconds are
identical
The ambulance came
and slowly you left
The doctor left as well
and I was alone
I sat and watched the ash in the fire fall
until to the steady rhythm of time
it grew cold in the grate
and I went to bed
The days now pass like the seconds
one upon another
each one different
but mostly about the same
I'd like to say 'I don't know how I managed'
but it's strange how you adjust
to the new incoming second
to each minute
and hour
and its
demands
Guy Jones is the writer in residence for Hothouse Theatre, a community theatre project in Nottingham. He has written several fringe-style plays and short films for Hothouse. He is also the editor of Oh My Nottz, an online magazine which is used as a focus for the creativity of young people and Writer’s Block an online magazine supporting, promoting and publishing written work from Nottinghamshire and beyond. He performs poems on the Nottingham scene. |
Alison Jones
The Intensity of a Walk in the Park
If she had a louder voice, she might have been dangerous,
but it has been swallowed to the diamond coal seam depths,
flung into a lidded pool, filled with stagnant water’s prayers.
Sometimes when I take her into my world, she hurries to designate
all things she knows, blackbird, songthrush, daffodil, sweet violet,
as if knowing the names for things makes us real, and present.
I have always come from elsewhere, my geometry so obvious
that as soon as we met, she was blinded, wished herself oblivion.
I have shaped myself careful, to be here inside both myths, and free.
We walk in the park, a grandmother hiding the sharpness of her teeth,
and her red cloaked daughter, pushing a concrete poetic, ancestral shades
making a desperate effort to combine into a single unit, called family,
as if they could not be razed by the thunderous roar of home breaking.
Placing her back careful layers of her sheltered nest, I am a cuckoo chick,
demolishing all her certainties, walking away, beyond her sightline, to soar.
Bindweed
Every time I find you embracing someone else,
I rip your body to abstraction, number of shreds,
unknown. I cast you like a curse, cauldron flung
into rusted metal buckets that wear patina like scars.
Sometimes I am uglier than you realise.
A witch who delights in gathering bliss in her own shape,
treats native vigour like divine catastrophe, always
afraid of what real wildness might do.
Speedwell
One day, when you are struggling and it all seems too much,
this will be a gift, waiting, it will not be what you expect.
Gifts always work differently, giving what you really need.
Stop. It is here, underfoot, see that spec of brightest blue,
next to your boot toe, about to be trodden? It is an angel’s eye.
Raise your foot gently, find a new equilibrium, elsewhere.
Attend the speedwell, a quiet messenger, scrutinising you,
say something, anything. If you are not used to conversing
with flowers, you could begin with simple greetings, try hello.
Do not talk about the weather, it knows more lore that you ever will.
Some days, it will give you the sky, others a chink of the Delt bowl
churched on high on your grandmother’s thou shalt not touch shelf
When you look, wealth is always waiting, not in the grandness
of gestures, or coins flashing bright as flare of a guttered flame,
but fastened, tentatively to this moment, holding our gaze.
Japanese Knotweed
Was originally fixed in meaning
as ornamental, now translated,
to so alive it is a problem.
A wellspring sent in vagrant shoots,
suppression an assured speciality,
with an insistence of substance.
Through each leaf forming,
in every tendrilled flex and stretch,
we sound the word invasive.
A clandestine operation, to occupy
spaces, like secrets we all carry,
a desolate freedom, advancing, resolute.
Alison Jones’ work has been widely published in journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Proletarian Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets, Heartwood (2018) and Omega (2020) were published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a full collection. |
Elizabeth Barton
A Refusal to Despair
I will not lie on a rack
of ash and sackcloth, turn
the hate of my worst enemy
against myself; I will not welt
my flesh with thoughts
of snubs, defeats, a thousand
small disgraces. This pain’s
not holy — it’s time to burn
this goats’ hair shirt,
this wire cilice that bites
into my thigh; instead,
I’ll wear a garter laced
with bluebells, a gown
of hawthorn blossom,
taste the champagne
of the finch’s song.
Briar Rose Breaks Free
I sickened of my gauzy bed, gagged
on honeysuckle, jasmine; bats thrummed
in my ears — I longed to shrug them off,
shut out the moon’s mad muttering
but I was chained in fear; I lay so still,
a goldcrest nested in my hair; my skin
paled with rime of lichen, spiders’ webs
and yet I burned, my blood so hot, it singed
the pearly wings of moths. I cried for help
but you, my prince, were in no state
to save a maiden in distress and so I ripped
my shroud, tore my cuffs of ivy, thrashed
through thorns until my shins and fingers bled.
A blackbird warned, There’s no way out!
but I was stubborn and had teeth to bite.
Elizabeth Barton’s debut pamphlet, If Grief were a Bird, was published in 2022 by Agenda Editions. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannóg, Mslexia, The High Window and the podcast, Poetry Worth Hearing. She is Stanza Rep for Mole Valley Poets and editor of their anthology. |
Sarah J Bryson
Flower Fairies of the Spring.
.
We walk out, down the lane, towards the quarry
Mother and I, noticing that spring has arrived
in abundance, with goosegrass – or is it Sticky Willie?
.
There are sweet violets, dandelions and stinging nettles,
plus dead nettles, purple and white. She tells me of the poems
from her childhood, Flower Fairies of the Spring.
.
Along the canal banks there’s Ladies Smock
and Butterbur, plus young leaves of dock. We point them out
to each other. Remember these, she says, in case of stings.
.
Look closely to find the ground ivy, though it’s not ivy at all,
with its violet funnelled flowers, and under the trees,
wood anemones, nearly over, and bluebells, nearly out.
.
Primroses and cowslips, along the verges, plus some early
cow parsley – or more prettily named, Queen Ann Lace,
and greater stitchwort with its deeply notched petals.
.Don’t forget the forget-me-nots she says. An upright plant
in fresh green and white, stands waiting to be named - but
the name escapes her, just now, being on the tip of her tongue.
.
As we come back up the lane the light is fading into dusk.
The sky behind is tinged with sunset and the air is chillier.
Time to get home for tea, we decide, striding a little faster.
.
We see that the daisies on the green have decided
it’s time to close for the night, have wrapped up to shutter
their yellow centres, exposing the pink undersides of their petals.
.
They are the days eyes, she says. As we come in the cat asks
for her food, wraps herself about our legs. I put on the kettle
and start to cook, while Mum sits at the kitchen table.
Jack by the hedge, she says, suddenly. I remembered.
After night shift
I weigh up the cost of a taxi against
missing the train, the thought
of the queue at the ticket office,
the idea of running for the bus
with the bag banging against my legs.
The taxi wins.
.
The driver lifts the hastily stuffed bag
as if filled only with balloons, asks
What time's the train, love?
then rally-style drives into town, through
the Marston Ferry Link Road queues
with me in the back heart bouncing.
.
At the station I rush to buy my ticket.
I need to get this one. I mustn’t keep Dad
waiting. My body clock is still on night shift
I worry I may fall asleep, miss my stop.
I find an empty compartment
and take the window seat.
.
I watch the stations go by,
Charlbury, Moreton-in-Marsh…
the country side is mesmeric,
makes my tired eyes slip into jagged
nystagmus. Not long now to
Worcester Shrub Hill.
.
He’s there, the engine running.
Then it’s the drive back for a whole week
of home, of someone else
carrying the can, a whole week
of being the child again.
Sarah is interested in words, words for well being, people and nature and the connections between these elements. She has poems in print journals, anthologies and on line. She enjoys taking her camera on long walks, and in her spare time still works as a nurse. |
Helen Overell
Absence
Take a stick of charcoal between finger
and thumb, place flat on the paper,
now sweep in great stuttered arcs
over the page until all is dark.
Look at the slow struggle of starlight
through patches of uneven infill,
see how the understated grain in pulped
white holds a skitter of crumbs —
brittle and black — branch and bole
unconsumed. Smooth with cloth
cut from an old worn-out cotton
T-shirt, fold this into a wedge
so as to ease away carbon depths,
tease out grayscale gradations,
make highlights, watch form emerge,
day take shape from shadow,
absence give rise to presence as clear
as the imprint of a handclasp.
The Duck's Tale
for AD
What can I have been thinking
to lay so far from water?
Anyway, the clutch hatched — all eleven,
damp dandelions, yolk fed, pipsqueak loud.
We set off at once across the dry spiky land —
you should have seen us, me waddling
ahead, a line of look-alikes following after,
my deep calls keeping them in order.
Of course there were pauses — there's always
one who lags behind, stutters panic,
the rest join in, we wait until the gap
closes, carry on in single file, united
we stand a chance, they know that
from first struggle with shellbreak.
We reached the flat stones, the ground
uneasy, the waddlets keeping up
as best they could, when a great
flurry passed us — tall, hurrying —
just near the long grass behind
those awkward holes — a mere hop over
for me, the littles threaded through,
took an age, the cool soothed my feet.
The earth shuddered now, enough to ruffle
feathers, the next step — the dark river
that roars, breathes tailspin, swallows flight whole —
not the best part of the journey.
We unhuddled, the bravehearts followed my lead
ready for anything, bold as daybreak.
That is when the angel walked before us,
flapping huge wings, bright as the sun,
all anyhow, the rushed air slowed to a trickle,
the world stood still, muttered, we set out
hot foot for the other side, not one lost;
the last lap was meadow filled with buttercups,
the scent of water; the ease of swim, the youngsters
bobbing round me, oh! his eyes were kind.
Helen Overell has work in several magazines and some of her poems were highly commended or placed in competitions including the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2018 and the Poetry News Members' poems Summer 2020. Her first collection Inscapes & Horizons was published by St Albert's Press in 2008 and her second collection Thumbprints was published by Oversteps in 2015. A booklet of her poems Measures for lute was published by The Lute Society in 2020.She takes an active role in Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society Stanza group. |
Kate Young
Ascension
You have a mountain to climb:
the diagnosis of the specialist
his words perched on a cliff edge.
She takes the word mountain
from the haar in her mind
and rolls it around her tongue
it tastes sharp, like the knife
that carves the scoop of her womb
from the scarp of tissue and bone.
So begins the rocky recovery
toe by toe, determined to reach
the bruised peak of her frailty.
The rucksack is filled with stone
slowing her ascent to a crawl
as she hauls herself, crag by crag
in the long drag to the summit
a million grains of granite
shaping her into a ghost.
She appears in the cloud
a speck of life in the shroud of Nevis
her smile as wide as a glen.
Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Sea Changes, The Poet, The Alchemy Spoon, Dreich, Fly on the Wall Press, Poetry Scotland, City, Town & Village, Boundaries & Borders and New Ways of Looking at Rye Harbour. She has also been published in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. Her pamphlet A Spark in the Darkness is published with Hedgehog Press. Find her on Twitter @Kateyoung12poet. |
Here is the cover of Michael's book which includes all the poems you will hear in this episode.
And here are the texts of the poems from Identified Flying Objects (Shoestring Press, 2024)
INTERNAL EXILE
Two ways to learn you don’t belong in Babylon.
The first, most obvious: somebody drags you there
with all your neighbours, puts you on a reservation
where there’s shade enough and water. You’re exhibits
though the fact you’ve been collected matters more
than who you are. Spectators sometimes watch and prod you
for amusement but your repertoire of zoo songs
has been lost along with all your other playthings
thrown among the bushes. Trees above your head
ooze misery like honeydew. It sticks to you.
Dust sticks to it. In grubby secrecy you plot
appalling retribution for your kidnappers.
The second starts at home: you realise your neighbours
are establishing a Babylon around you,
disciplining grass you left un-mown last year.
They’re planting borders in (they say) the proper way
replacing new varieties of fruiting bush
with hedges and a maze that only they can thread.
You learn you never knew them. Nor do they know you.
They talk of building walls with towers, flagpoles, flags
above an avenue of statues: you suggest
the ground won’t bear the weight. They try to drown you out
by bellowing, dead-eyed, an old song of denial.
I was among the captives by the river Chebar… in the land of the Babylonians, Ezekiel 1:1
STREET THEATRE
He wonders why his precious flesh remains
unbruised beside the gutters of Barbican
where he’s laid himself down and kept
extended silence. He remembers sighing
when he acquiesced to wearing shackles
as a wider warning of impending
penalties.
Black axioms
are hidden in the pockets of dark suits
on money men who must step round him.
As they do, far more of them
ignore him than will meet his eyes
or scan his dumb-show doomsday tokens.
Amid the mud he is meticulous
to promise no more than he knows
and threaten nothing less. No softening
of his position is permitted
to trip up passers-by and overturn
their bland indifference to sewage stink
and wet corruption clinging to their ankles.
He marvels that his holy bones
still hold together in his fragile carcase.
[T]ake a tile, and lay it before yourself, and portray on it a city, even Jerusalem. Lay siege against it … Ezekiel 4:1 & 4
SPEAK WEALTH (extracts)
Speak Wealth!
Let this be your language now!
Hold forth on offshore holdings;
rhapsodize on themed Investments;
make a song and dance about
financial instruments.
Speak Wealth
so we can overhear you –
or get the media to tell us
of your newest acquisition,
your most recent self-indulgence.
We get by on smaller change –
the sort that fits in off-peak meters,
slot machines or gaps in floorboards.
We must juggle obligations,
as we walk the fraying wire
stretched between each pair of paydays;
this makes us proficient
in precarious arithmetic.
*
Speak Wealth and it can sound like scripture.
After all, the Bible says
To those who have shall more be given
(but we have-nots aren’t exempt
from losing even what we have).
We’re confident this verse endorses
your strong views on market forces.
Oddly though it fails to mention
Trickle Down – that’s your invention –
since another scripture states
You’ll always have the poor with you.
by your trading you have increased your riches, and your heart is lifted up because of your riches Ezekiel 28:
I, WILLIAM BLAKE
A boy believes in angels up an oak tree
on the way to Croydon. That’s OK:
what’s to disbelieve when curtains
cutting off this world from any others
are thin as yellow skeletons of autumn leaves?
Nature’s drapes and angel wings
look pretty much the same
and spread or fold as fleetingly
as sparkle-shimmers flash across our eyes
when low sun strikes a window pane.
He looks out now through pity’s casement.
Cold wind blows across the common,
scatters morning’s opportunities
beyond the reach of any small blue hands
not plunged in hollow pockets
or clasped round chests and tucked in armpits
of a worn-out crumpled jacket, left unwanted,
like its wearer, underneath a hedge.
The people of the land have used oppression and exercised robbery. Yes, they have troubled the poor and needy. Ezekiel 22:29
CONNECTING WITH THE WRECK
While Tom’s elsewhere, she shops for curios.
One day she finds a wartime postcard of an airship
shot down then washed up on nearby sands.
She sees the tangled girder mess in tattered fabric
as both prophecy and parody
of her shattered, shabby marriage: awkward limbs
at scarecrow angles; two cold souls half-wrapped in bed sheets.
Her heart was never rightly put together.
Leaky valves let hope escape so buoyancy
is lost and she is often overcome
by tight-clenched fears, especially in bed at night.
And is it self-importance or hot air
that keeps his skin so taut? If that were burned away
by shame, his suit would hide a blackened skeleton.
She guesses there were bodies stiff as his discovered
in the airship’s wreck. But she identifies
with chilled survivors clinging to a broken structure
drifting with the flotsam till picked up
by enemies. Is capture while escaping
with one’s life good luck or bad? She isn’t sure
if she’d prefer a prison to a headstone.
She imagines how the empty hulk was tethered,
taken under tow then hauled offshore,
cut free and left to founder. After one brief surge
the placid ocean would have pulled itself together
as if nothing of importance had occurred.
She wishes she could replicate that makeshift mix
of burial at sea and clean annulment.
… and all the pilots of the sea will come down from their ships. They will stand on the land, and will cause their voice to be heard Ezekiel 27:29-30
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician and current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip. He is also co-host of the reading series Poetry above the Crypt in Islington, North London. "Identified Flying Objects" (Shoestring 2024) is his sixth full collection. |
So ends Episode 23 of Poetry Worth Hearing. You can hear it at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy
The theme for the next episode will be 'other(s)'; to be interpreted in any way you choose. How do you deal with others/the other; do you feel yourself other; what is othering?
Submissions of not more than 4 minutes of unpublished poems plus texts plus author bio should be sent to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com. I would really appreciate suggestions and comments which should be sent to the same email address.