Poetry worth Hearing: Episode 26

This episode features an interview with Northern Ireland poet, Matthew Rice, where he talks about his jurney in poetry and gives a short reading of his work. Most of the poems come from his forthcoming collection which deals with the experience of shift work in a factory. Matthew's presentation of blue collar industrial work from the inside is fairly unusual in poetry, and this insider's view accords well with the theme of inside / outside which was the prompt for this episode. It was chosen to give poets plenty of latitude and this is reflected in the variety and wealth of poems received. Poets in this episode include Alison Jones, John White, Helen Overell, Clare Starling, Pat Winslow, Jane Thomas, Susan Thomas, Guy Jones, Polly Walshe, Maureen Jivani, Julia Webb, John Daniel, Diana Bell, Lizzie Ballagher, Stephen Claughton and Lucy Ingrams.

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull (US). You can read some of his new work in The Poetry Review, Spring 2024.

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Alison Jones

Felis Silvestris (Captive)

Wildcat in the zoo,

muscles along the metal perimeter

of a gift, named enclosure.

We will preserve 

what we are losing,

and keep it here for everyone.

I have paid to see a species in mourning,

narrated as too  dangerous to be free, 

while the monsters roam beyond the fence.

Cat I must not touch,

though her banded body and club tail

ghost me to the cat who prowls my kitchen. 

When will we stop believing we are saving what is gone?

The sleight of hand, glittering coins pulled from earth and air,

the fearless fight for territory,  the death kiss of dagger teeth.

Her pacing is relentless,

like a prisoner circling a barren yard, or

a friend's ex-boyfriend, who worked on the rigs,

and ran round the helipad every day,

like a vulnerable trapped rodent.

Her origami eye folds in forest memories, 

diminishing auroch, tarpan,  brown bear to fine amber tissue,

as a paper sign sings wild she has never known.

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, and an interdisciplinary project bringing together poetry, music, art and film.

John White

At Ballyrolly Farmhouse

‘The farm was my country ….’ (Robert Sugar, child resident at the Millisle Kinderfarm.)

Escaped from the Kristallnacht,

they pitched up near tracts of patched airfields

and bevelled hedges, wind to skin you,

a clapped farmhouse where they stood

the damaged flax back in better days.

Names like Sugar, Jakobi

are strange, yet they seem also strangers

to each other, learning English at

the half-Scots school in tidy

columns, psalms flung from chests that burgeon.

Two Clydesdales, a Ferguson

tractor, bring barley, beet, potatoes.

Mentor, Erwin, plays the saxophone.

A pitstop between Millisle

and Carrodore becomes their cosmos.

The peninsula unbends –

on serrated shorelines, waders root

for something intact. There’s Newsreel shows

in town. What they take, they take

in fragments, grit their teeth hard, crack on.      

A native of County Derry, John White lives now in Oxfordshire, where he works in a special school. Published widely, including the Oxford Poets series (Carcanet), he was commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry and the Magma Poetry Prize (2024). His debut pamphlet, ‘Attachments’, won the 2023 iOTA Shots competition, and was published in June 2024 by Templar Poetry.

Helen Overell

Filling Factory — Number 5 team

Number 1 team worked with high explosives

Called up at start of war, just seventeen, set to work in munitions — packing shells;

whole team searched once through those gates

and again after changing — no kirby grips allowed, nothing metal, although wedding

rings, if any, could be kept on and taped over. Worst bit were fitting lids — felt awful

first time, came over all faint, girl showing me what to do and not do, looked at me, face drained pale, skin clemmed, walked me outside into fresh air — just enough solder

needed, and only on rim, too much and shell failed.

Best part were filling crates, being asked to tuck in all those letters,

begged I know I sent one this morning but can you put another in for me

this afternoon? Love notes going to and fro to men at airfield — total strangers they

were — taking a risk against all the odds; You don't know anything about him — says he's

not married? They all say that, love. Mind you, there were at least one marriage came

about and still going strong —

he were a tall, dark, handsome Scot and she were but a slip of a girl, a right Yorkshire

lass — both old and gray now.

The relief at end of shift, stood in line, patted about, Who knows why — who'd have

wanted owt o' that? Hurried along, shedding those overalls caked with powder, larking about with not a lot on, stepping over barrier onto clean side and into own clothes,

tidying and pinning up hair ready for civvy street before yet another search What on

earth could they have been looking for? Then freedom of sorts — hands, face yellow —

No amount of washing would shift that, awful if you were asked to a wedding ... factory

canaries for the duration.

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.

Clare Starling

Bee On The Tube

Thirty metres down

below Green Park,

in bloomless gloom

it draws its loops tighter,

smacks against

scratched glass,

sideswipes the shuffling

beggar who now starts          

to loudly shout Sorry

to bother you Ladies and Gentlemen -

Bee’s mad buzz blends

with the tunnel’s empty shriek,

while, crammed in tight,

ranks of the flower-free

give a blind flinch,

eyes fixed on small screens,

each the sad protagonist

of a half-reflected story.

A hundred animals

in a transportation device -

no one, except the wild-

eyed supplicant

who flails his arms

like a storm-blasted tree

is of a mind to heed

the spiralling bee.

Clare Starling started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism during lockdown. Her pamphlet Magpie’s Nest won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award 2023. She particularly loves writing about our connection with nature, and about how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world.

Pat Winslow

The Cracks Are Showing                                                                                                                                    

Those hard-to-reach places aren’t cleaned any more:

limescale crusts the sinks and shower, the toilet bowl

is scratched and yellow. Windows rattle, doors squeal,

the chimney leaks. There’s food on the dining room floor.

Pale cobwebs hammock the garage shelves and walls.

Tins of paint that will never be used again are stacked

three-high, seams rotting, their hammered lids stuck.

Rust creeps along pitted screwdrivers and tenon saws.

Carpet tacks and nails turn to dust in cardboard trays.

Light bulbs go unchanged. The house begins to darken.

Each time you visit there’s some new corner to brighten.

The shine, the gift you bring with you each time, takes days

to restore. You need a proper scouring more and more,

something like the sea to leave you scrubbed and raw.

Pat Winslow has published seven collections, most recently, Kissing Bones with Templar Poetry. A winner of several notable competitions over the years, she enjoys commissioned collaborations with film-makers, composers and artists. She is about to direct a community opera.

Jane Thomas

Your Front Door

[The frame and limit of your world, locked in

and locked out, sentry alarms on both sides]

            Pane of mottled glass

            [conjures spectres of all who call]

            Silver letterbox sealed

            [communications long redirected]

            Draft excluder

            [sleeping serpent eating its own tail]

You want to go home but you're already here.

Jane Thomas writes about health, inequalities, and interbeing.

She serves as a trustee at The National Centre for Creative Health.   And has been highly commended in The Bridport, Fish, Live Canon, Hippocrates. Her recent works have been published in Stand, Mslexia, The Rialto and The Oxford Review of Books.  

She has received support from, The Arts Council England and The Society of Authors, this autumn she will participate in Eurotas Creative Bridges, Masters Series and PEN International Congress.

https://www.janethomas.org/

Susan Thomas

OUTSIDE

You say you want to die outside.

I think this is a first

although I do recall long ago

a patient in their bed in the courtyard

dappled by the afternoon trees,

the leaves tinkling like milk-bottle tops

slipping away while they slept.

It was hard to notice, the lack of rise

from their chest, the gentle absence

of breath – replaced by birdsong,

but placing a hand on their shoulder

they could not be woken - it was pretty much perfect.

Now we discuss what we will do if it rains, if it is night,

if the wind blows or the sun screams down

where we will plug in the bed?

Maintenance is called.

A gazebo is erected.

These days it is difficult to connect to the stars,

but we circumnavigate the cosmos

try and get you there, respond to the

primordial pull rather than protocols.

We open the doors, and let the curtains

billow like rolling waves

feel the chill rise of goose skin on our

sleeveless arms, laugh with you as we

wheel your bed over the doorframe bump

into the garden, bringing you closer

to the earth.                                           

Susan Thomas is a senior staff nurse in a hospice which often inspires her poetry.  She has won the Elmbridge Prize,  Arts University of Bournemouth Prize, was longlisted for National Poetry Competition 2022.  She was commended for the Hippocrates Prize in 2021 and 2024 and won the Hippocrates Prize in 2022.  Her work has been part of a Surrey art exhibition created by Whistlestop Arts on the subject of death and dying - Shrouded In Silence.

Guy Jones

The Man Outside

The man outside my house

is a long way from home

He showed me a picture on his phone once

There was a a large table leaden with dishes

bread

vegetables

fruit

and jugs of fresh

clean

spring water

beyond the table

on a dry paddock

chickens roamed

and waited for the arrival

of brothers and sisters

giggling children

and the chattering of family

that is everything

The man in the car outside my house

is a long way from home

I know

because he told me once

how his mother was the candle of the house

a light that was everything

that never went out

and how his father broke the bread

at the head of the table and listened to the news

that his sons and daughters brought

from all four corners

of his world

The man who sleeps in the car outside my house

is a long way from home

I know because he painted me an image

of how beautiful his country was

before the bombs fell

and he had to dig his son out of the rubble

before they starting carrying guns

and bullying on the streets

before people disappeared

and they raped

He left with his wife and children

when the guns pointed at his head

and they strung him up for days

in a dark place

They washed up on this shore

where his marriage broke on the rocks

of thoughts that will not stop

of gun points

and anger

and fear

The Man in the car outside my house

lies awake

on a borrowed inflatable mattress

drinking begged for coffee

waiting for the slow cogs of helpfulness 

in a distant land

to turn

straining the internet

for news

of brothers and sisters

and whether father still breaks bread

and if a candle still burns \

in his long away home.

Guy Jones is the Writer In Residence for Hothouse Theatre, a community theatre, audio and film 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. Oh My Nottz includes Writer’s Block pages which support and promotes written work, workshops and events from Nottinghamshire and beyond.

He performs his poems on the Nottingham Poetry scenes and is an active member of DIY Poets.

Polly Walshe

Blink

What is there to be said

Of the woman with nowhere to live

Except that she appears

If you forget to blink

Looking red in the face and raw

With a pizza crust in her hand

Picked up from the street?

If you give her a note or a coin

Won’t it make her more keen

To step into the land

Between your blinks

Posing a question you can’t stand?

Her skin, you think,

How did it get so lined?

After how many hours

Of cold and sun and wind

Did she start to look so bad?

Aren’t there services for people like her?

Why didn’t she look for help

Or simply take more care?

How is it your fault

If she doesn’t fit,

And won’t follow the rules?

How are you the culprit in this?

You can only get on with your life

And leave her to hers

Which – from what people say –

She may well prefer.

Polly Walshe is a poet and painter. In recent years her poems have appeared in magazines including Acumen, Pennine Platform, PN Review, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine, Shearsman and The Spectator. Her poems have been longlisted three times in the National Poetry Competition. In 2019 a selection of her poems featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in the exhibition Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery in New York City. In the same year she won the Frogmore Prize. This year, 2024, her poem Holiday Rental appeared in the Candlestick Press anthology Wish You Were Here. Her novel The Latecomer was published by Random House in 1997 and won a Betty Trask Award.

Maureen Jivani

Alma is a God in Ruins

After Johnny Vegas’s Broken Angel

Barely dressed, and cold,

on a bench outside the Blue Angel

Alma examines her dislocated wing:

featherlight and swept across her knees,

it is structurally sound, no broken

quills or shafts, no shattered barbs

or barbules. All hooks intact. 

Its feathers, softer, purer than a child’s

first laugh. Its scent is snow.

What then are we to make of this:

her inability to part the heavy air and soar,

to reach her Paradise.

Which beast convinced her

of such brokenness,

cast her down, afraid to fly?

Maureen Jivani’s recent poetry can be found in Alba, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Orbis, The Friday Poem, Scintilla, and Under the Radar. Her first collection Insensible Heart was published by Mulfran Press. She is currently finalising her second collection Alma and the Blue Slide.

Julia Webb

A woman’s hair is trailing through the mud

the river is flowing past her head

the moon shines placidly above

a light drizzle begins to fall

the evening is as black as soot or coal

her head is pillowed on the grass

her face already wet so that at first

she doesn’t notice the drizzle fall

her dress is ripped and a button has come off

the river is quiet

but flows insistently past

she wonders where ducks go at night

she wonders if she should try and stand up

the grass is soft and wet beneath her head

water keeps falling from the sky

it pools at the corners of her eyes

but she doesn’t move

the rain is cool and gentle

it doesn’t hurt at all

the person she thought was her friend has gone

there’s just the rain  

the river   the grass   the mud

The sea wasn’t getting any closer

I was holding the road in my mind

but the road was moving

or I was moving

I couldn’t tell any more

I was no longer relevant

words snaked out of my mouth

it was we the whole way

we were in the car

the car was a live thing

we followed its will

we were all around the houses

we were up and down and sideways

we were in between

we were falling down

the humid cracks of the day

rolling away in the gutter like hot coins

you asked me if this was the right way

and I knew I should know the answer

but my head was full of song lyrics

they spooled out across my mind

I was a camera filming blindly

not taking anything in

the light was spilling everywhere

it made the trees divine

Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer and artist from a working class background. She has an MA in Poetry from the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry (2017, 2023).  She has three collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016) Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022). She lives in Norwich where she runs real world and email poetry courses, mentors for The Writing Coach and is an editor for 'Lighthouse' - a journal for new writers. Her fourth collection Grey Time will be published in 2025.

John Daniel

Anniversary  gift

You bought me a pear tree -

Conference, with sweet flavour

 but the bushes around it grew faster,

 hiding your gift in thick shrubbery

year after married year,    

 the pear tree persisted,

breaking through  thick-leafed invaders,

proffering a limb to the sunlight

like an arm pushed through a letter-box,

 bright oval leaves appearing

 surviving my gardening skills,

the darkness of fir and laburnum,

hostile brambles and ivy,

a  gift from the tangled thicket of love

with white blossom in May,

a pear, a wedding bouquet.

John Daniel is one of a number of Modern Poets in a Faber anthology Introduction One and has had poems published in Rialto, The Journal, Smiths Knoll, Fourteen, Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, North Stone Review.  He has published four collections of poetry, Skinning the Bull and Lighting the Fire (Oversteps), Missing the Boat (Etruscan Press) and Pushing 100 (Pennycomequick)about caring for an aged mother.  He has also won several poetry prizes including the Camden Poetry competition. Exeter poetry competition and Kent and Sussex competition. He has read his work at festivals including Ways with Words and the South Bank.

Diana Bell

Full Moon Night

I step outside.

There is a tightness in the air -

clouds are moving fast across the sky,

the moon has a halo

and no birds sing.

A deer steps lightly through the trees;

The fox knows this is a good night

to take the unwary.

And what do I know?

That the earth is a sphere in space,

that there are seven billion humans on the planet,

that the moon is three hundred thousand miles away,

that there are eight planets in the solar system,

that we are part of a galaxy,

that there are a hundred billion galaxies.

I breathe deeply

and go back inside

where music is playing.

Diana Bell is a multi-media visual artist including sculpture, installation and painting. She has won awards for her sculpture and for her work in hospitals. She has always written poetry and worked with poets, but did not try to get any of her work published until joining Oxford Stanza Two. 

Lizzie Ballagher

No walls, no windows

Untamed oceans at the screen-door

shut tight against their salt—

their sting and spatter of sand—bear in

the same sea-scent, which whines,

insinuating, through keyholes; froths

in foaming jars of samphire on the kitchen shelf.

Outside comes to in: flash of goldfinch wings—

black-yellow-silver—they one year nested

on the porch in pots of blue lobelias, salvias;

on mats, the smear of mud from Havenfold—

a field, though rank with cow-dung—

where blood-red poppies blow in May;

the shrill of chrome-beaked herring-gulls

haunting a chimney breast, blown in

by gales, lamenting on our sills;

black-beaked head of a volcano looming

through the window-frame, demonic shadow cast

across galaxies of lupins, lupins, all unploughed.

No walls can work; no windows, doors,

can block when, in all our houses, outside

comes to inside like a tide.

After something of a writer's drought, Lizzie Ballagher is encouraged to have more work in print and in performance than for a long time. She recently took part in the Fingal P0etry Festival in Skerries, near Dublin, and is due to read, too, at the Poetry on the Lake Festival in Italy in October. She finds that poetry  - both on the page and on stage - offers unique insights not often found in prose, and that it shines light into and over dark places in life.

Stephen Claughton

Umbrellas

‘It is not where it is or what it is that matters

but how you see it.’ – Saul Leiter

Rain streaks a café window

on the Lower East Side,

blurring the street beyond—

the same in the automat

and the barber’s shop,

a dissolve of lens-like droplets.

It’s a rainy day in New York,

a diluvial downpour.

Slickers and rubbers are out

and it’s hats off to men in hats,

who are having their last hurrah

in fifties America.

But the shots Saul really wants,

the ones it’s worth getting wet for,

are those that feature umbrellas.

Red, green, maroon and black,

they mushroom everywhere,

dotted along the street,

or clustering at crosswalks,

forming testudos braced

against the incoming attack.

Rain beats on their drum-tight

skins and bounces off.

It’s neat how their shapely curves

offset the sharp-elbowed angles

of Gotham’s gridiron blocks,

making the East Coast exotic.

All over Manhattan Island,

umbrellas are opening up

the Japanese floating world of ukiyo-e.

Geishas blossom like cherry trees

with bright paper parasols,

making light of it all.

‘Not umbrellas again,’

his lab assistant groans.

‘I love umbrellas!’ says Saul.

Stephen Claughton grew up in Manchester, read English at Oxford and worked for many years as a civil servant in London. His poems have appeared widely in print and online and he has published two pamphlets, The War with Hannibal (Poetry Salzburg, 2019) and The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). He is the Chair of Ver Poets and reviews for London Grip and The High Window. He blogs occasionally at www.stephenclaughton.com, where links to his poems, reviews and pamphlets can be found.

Lucy Ingrams

putting away tools

this poem will not give you    pippins | waxcaps | redwings | walnuts | gales    or other names

  in the book of autumn       

or rewind dialects of summer :    common blue    or damselfly    or marguerite       

or dwell on pale bodhisattva bulbs beneath the clay    waiting for enlightenment    or spring 

instead this poem combs defeat    and grass    that used to high and tine the sun to green     

but yellows to tobacco now    straggles in the dark of stars    and cold 

which leaves the mower    some shed-space for it    and sitting out the long vowels of winter—

Lucy Ingrams' first pamphlet, Light-fall (2019) was published by Flarestack Poets 

and her debut collection, Signs (2023) by Live Canon. Awards for her work include the Manchester Poetry Prize and Magma’s poetry prize. She is based in Oxford.

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You can find the podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-26-e2op29p or on Audible or Apple podcasts.

Next month's episode will have the theme 'canonical' and it hopes to look at the canon, whatever that may be, from many different angles. If you would like to contribute, please send submissions of up to four minutes' recording of unpublished poems with the texts and a short author bio to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com.

Deadline: October 18th.

Suggestions or comments are always welcome and should be sent to the same address.