Poetry Worth Hearing: Episode 41

This month's interview was with Jane Draycott who talks about her life in poetry and reads poems by a couple of her favourite poets as well as three of her own poems. For this episode, I asked for poems prompted by 'colour' and you will hear work by Jamie McKendrick, Dinah Livingstone, Emma Dandy, Sarah Watkinson, Lizzie Ballagher, Derek Sellen, Kate Young, Caroline Jackson-Houlston, Deborah Lloyd, Ruth Verity Sharman, Sue Wallace-Shaddad, Trisha Broomfield and Terry Jones. Listen to this episode at https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bm5VF4GbeDLBY7UAqHxrz?si=TDsCMwlYR5CzC3t2puV5lw&nd=1&dlsi=0d94477b93c44254 or on You Tube, Spotify or Audible podcasts.

Jane Draycott is a poet, translator and teacher. Her most recent collection of poems is The Kingdom (Carcanet, 2023). Other works include

Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet Press, 1999)

Tideway. Illustrator Peter Hay. Two Rivers Press. 2002.

The Night Tree (Carcanet Press, 2004)

Over (Carcanet Press, 2009)

Pearl (Carcanet Press, 2011)

The Occupant (Carcanet Press, 2016)

Storms Under the Skin: Selected Poems 1927-1954 Henri Michaux - translations(Two Rivers Press, 2017)

Pearl won the Stephen Spender Prize.

In 2020 Draycott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2023 was awarded a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award.

She currently teaches on the Oxford Masters' Degree in Creative Writing.

Poets Jane referred to as significant influences included

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Tomas Tranströmer

Martinus Nijhoff

Henri Michaux

Anne Carson

Alice Oswald

She read Wallace Steven's poem 'Nomad Exquisite' which I include here, because the sound was less than perfect:

Nomad Exquisite

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth

The big-finned palm

And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth hymn and hymn

From the beholder,

Beholding all these green sides

And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,

Meet for the eye of the young alligator,

And lightning colors

So, in me, come flinging

Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

She also read from Anne Carson's 'Essay on Glass'.

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Jamie McKendrick

Grisly Rokkes Blake

All the effort of fat England's tapered off

to this landsend seawall and become

a remoteness it would take another Alfred Wallis

scowling at the sunshine from the doorstep

of his Marine Stores depot to depict

with yacht paint and torn cardboard. Once he asked

Ben Nicholson for some colours he was short of.

Which colours? Rock-colour and sand-colour

but not to use for painting rock or sand.

You don't want to use too many colours.

Out from Porthmeor Beach hangs the upended

Atlantic with its jade-green wide-eyed light

scanned by the avid yellow eyes

of imperious, sandwich-snatching gulls

from the slate rooves covered with bright orange lichen,

from the sills armoured with a fakir’s bed

of anti-avian prongs and toothpicks set in foam.

Beyond the black rocks, beyond the fragile harbour,

pointing westward in the cold dark currents,

a shoal of pilchards skirts a Spanish wreck.

Jamie McKendrick has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Drypoint and the self-illustrated pamphlet The Years which won the Michael Marks Illustration Award. He has translated, among other works, all six books of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara and has translated the poems of Valerio Magrelli and Antonella Anedda. His writings on art and poetry have been gathered together in The Foreign Connection.

Dinah Livingstone

RED

This red  flag is the rage of being

wind-tattered, fluttering triumphantly.

The people’s flag is deepest red.

`Refugees are welcome here'

sang half a million Londoners.

This kind heart is a strong pump

for the red blood rhythm,

energy beat, sweet delight.

But disappointed womb

stained the rag red, lost child. 

It needed a great heart

to overcome the pain of loss,

rise from that bitter bed

and go on living generously.

She became a loving auntie

when her sister had a baby.

Sometimes you sweat blood

to overcome the chaos and undoing

and reassemble self

or words surging and unordered

to form a glad new poem,

maybe perform it in good company

and afterwards enjoy the wine of fellowship,

circulating white or red.

Dinah has given many poetry readings in London, throughout Britain and abroad. Her poetry collections include Embodiment (2019) and Poems of Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park (2012). She has received three Arts Council Writer’s Awards for her poetry.  Her prose books include Poetry Handbook for Readers and. Writers (Macmillan 1993). She is also a translator with a special interest in Latin American poetry, including Prayer in the National Stadium by the Chilean poet María Eugenia Bravo Calderara (1992) and Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1993).. More info: katabasis.co.uk/dinah.html

Sarah Watkinson

Easter Light

Sunlight projects white windows on my wall

three times six panes of morning sun.

The same light on the still-bare woods outside

returns them to my eye a greenish gold.

The whole impression fills me with energy.

I am full of hope for the day as it begins.

I hear warblers in the nearby apple tree

and a pheasant in the alders by the river.

Yellow has left the sky (which looks pale blue).

At six my daughter refused painting. She said

it was impossible for her, a child, to achieve

Titian’s Phaeton bursting from the clouds.

Next Monday we’ll all head north to the old *hafod.

It’s Easter and they’ll go out before breakfast

and gather gold gorse flowers from the prickles

to celebrate by dying our boiled eggs yellow.

*Hafod (Welsh): small house on the hills where the younger people take the cattle and sheep for summer pasture. The old remain at Hendre, the big family house in the valley.

Sarah Watkinson’s . Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight won the Cinnamon Pamphlet Prize 2016. Her collection Photovoltaic (Valley Press, 2024), longlisted for the 2022 Laurel prize, and  a pamphlet The Woods of Hazel jointly with Romola Parish, both arose from her writing residency at Wytham Woods, Oxford University’s ecological field site.

She is a guest at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery  and her current work in progress is a sequence of poems inspired by its director, Prof Yadvinder Malhi’s concept of ‘Planetary Metabolism’.

Emma Dandy

Think of poor Albert

after T. S. Eliot

Trafalgar Tavern, midday pint. The tide

is high at Greenwich Reach. Now Sunday Best

Albert is throned in leather chair beside

the fire. I listen as he tells his fleet

of friends how he adores his Lil. I guess

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

they have ignored the blue with purple edge

that stains your skin and fades to yellow smudge,

and how you try to hide from others’ eyes.

But I have eavesdropped at your door when you

have cried and cried and cried yourself to sleep.

So now, while gentlemen drink up their beers,

I’ll leave the pub and come and help you cook;

make sure the rib of beef is prepped the way

he likes, to save you from another fight.

I have decided that today’s the day

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

that I will crush a roofie in his wine.

When Albert comes back home and thumps his fist

demanding food, I’ll offer him the glass

to pacify his mood. Then the fucker

will feel his head begin to swim. His bones

will fail to stop him crumpling. Your bag

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

is packed and hidden in my car, along

with all the cash you’ve saved so you can leave.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Goodbye patience, goodbye virtue, goodbye grace.

Goodbye Albert. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Come with me, please. Come with me. Please come with me. Please. Come.

Emma Dandy's writing explores the fracturing of identity after trauma. Publication of her debut pamphlet I Laid Out Knives, Guns and Razors is forthcoming with Hedgehog Poetry Press. Her work has been published in various literary journals and anthologies, most recently in Eche Poetry and Echoes from the Goatshed. You can find her on Instagram @emmadandypoetry 

Lizzie Ballagher

Blue Lupins

From under hard-edged slabs of Arctic sky

white as ice on ridge tops,

and from under basalt mountain pillars

heaved up by cauldrons of fire an age ago,

other flames erupt: blue fires,

blue—

Whoever knew there were so many blues?—

shadowy blue lamps among black clumps

of coals spewed up by restless lava fields,

cream blues of northern waves,

pink blues on older, moss-clad wastes

in daytime memory of the hues of midnight sun,

mountain-purple blues, indigo blues smudging, melting away,

bilberry blues spiked with little bees,

smoke blues: curls of them drifting,

smouldering in tufted grasses

where bog cushions of thrift grow,

where sulphur steams blow and bubble

in thin blue streams on lava floors,

where rocky soils have sunk—

the crust ripped apart inch by inch.

Yes, in these scars on broken lands below

and under the black beaks of new volcanoes

open to trumpet their blasts

blaze up lupins—blue

for miles and cobalt miles

to the turquoise of the Arctic Sea.

Ballagher's focus is on landscapes, both interior and exterior; also on the beauty of nature. 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/

Derek Sellen

Indigo

A fanfare of hues,

Tuareg men, inky turbaned,

striding their lost lands in billows of indigo.

Newton matches the score

                              to the tune in his head

A lament, a mourning,

for slaves and contract labourers

stained deeper than skin by indigo dye.

a note on the scale

                              between blue and violet

A folk-song, a work-song,

for brass-buttoned denim

with a sweat-drop woven in each indigo stitch.

to complete the seven

                              cords of a rainbow

A spiritual, a hymn

to the indelible gods

that reveal themselves in indigo,

indigo-black, indigo-purple, indigo-blue…

Indigo-black, indigo-purple, indigo-blue…

Indigo-black, indigo-purple, indigo-blue...

                                                                    (repeat and fade)

Derek Sellen, from Canterbury, has performed his work in the UK and Europe. His third collection, The Night Bus will be published in November 2026 by the Cinnamon Press. His poems are published widely and recognised in many competitions, twice winning Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and three times winning O’Bheal (Cork). His last collection The Other Guernica – poems inspired by Spanish art  was a finalist in the Poetry Book Awards.

Kate Young

Orange in Near-Rhyme

They said it was a challenge

that nothing rhymes with orange,

a loner of a word

cringe worthy of a prime number

in my over-used Thesaurus.

But it is so much more

than six letters shaped on a page –

it is a sponge

soaked in all the senses,

a syringe infused with spice and rust.

It’s the cringe of juice on a tongue,

the early morning fizz of ginger

bronzing the morning,

the strange tang of marmalade

or the flame of a zinnia in summer.

It’s the hinged wings of a butterfly

fringed in apricot tones,

the gunge of over-ripe mango 

or the pelt of a fox’s fur,

its sunstone eyes blazing.

They said it was a challenge,

that nothing rhymes with orange

but sink into dusk when

the sun plunges, singeing the sky

and you will hear the rhyme.

Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood.

Her work has appeared in Stand, The Ekphrastic Review, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Sea Changes, Snakeskin, The Alchemy Spoon, Fly on the Wall Press, Poetry Scotland, The Lake and Littoral.

She has also been published in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate are published with Hedgehog Press.

Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

Caroline Jackson-Houlston

COLOUR VISION:  IN THE PURPLE? IN THE RED?

Isaac Newton chopped up the rainbow’s light

Into seven magical divisions

And what we could not name was out of sight.

The word ‘pink’ meant a decorative cut.

In Welsh, ‘glas’ still means blue, or green, or grey.

For ancient Anglo-Saxons, ‘brun’ was ‘bright’;

The Latin word ‘purpureus’ meant this too.

‘Caeruleus’ was the colour of sky,

But also of the Tiber’s muddied flood.

‘Imperial purple’ was often blood-red,

Depending on which Murex was fished up.

Some Victorians still made no distinction,

Even in books on botany. John Clare

Found none. The hero of Tennyson’s Maud

Thought heather red—yet this showed he was mad;

But Clare perceived the communality

Of the knowledge of enduring violence,

Saw the ‘blood and dust’ of Danes or Romans

Springing from the earth of the east Midlands,

Resurrected in the purple Pasqueflower,

Where it still haunts earthworks, barrows, boundaries,

In grasslands that are still lonely enough.

Buried blood cries out to us through colour.

Caroline Jackson-Houlston turned to painting and writing poetry more often after retirement from lecturing in nineteenth-century English literature. These activities link with voluntary roles as a nature reserve warden and Wildlife Trusts ambassador.

Deborah Lloyd

Flawed

Calm creeps along the fitted carpet.

Whether it is oatmeal, cream, natural,

parchment, off white or fawn,

all seems beige to me.

Life laid bare. Floors bored,

life yawns.

Deborah writes: My poem Matthew Arnold's Field was published in Green Ink Press and Sinking was longlisted in Write by the Sea Competition 2024. I also have flash fiction published in Penumbra and I am writing a fantasy novel The Golden Realm.

I am inspired by the possibility and poetry of the everyday. My most creative ideas come when tending my flower garden and playing with my lovely grandsons. When I am not writing I will be walking in the woods.

Ruth Verity Sharman

Leaving Tamil Nadu

Here, stony midwinter, bone-freezing cold.

There, a gentle breeze. The rustle of palm leaves

brushing against the Daphne’s roof terrace

where Mister Parthi’s shooing away a monkey

and rearranging the fairy lights, and Mani’s cursing

as next-door’s waterpipe overflows, again.

I can hear the crows, shouting in the street,

a tuk-tuk blowing its horn. And, look, there’s another            

of those butterflies – a crimson rose – fluttering                  

over the jasmine. Within breathing distance

of that scent a new breakfast guest has settled down

to a plateful of papaya the colour of sunrise.

And I think of my father leaving too, like me

but after thirty years. How he’d still refer to tappal

when waiting for the post and to Madras

when going into town, and how he loved to laugh     

about our English weather and the “pale gamboge light      

that passes for sunshine north of the Equator” –

little giveaways to which we paid no more attention                       

than to the copper bowls from Tanjore or that painting

of bullock carts stirring up dust in the road.

Ruth Sharman lives in Bath, where she works as a freelance translator from French. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive series. Picador published her first solo collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies, whose title poem won second prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition and featured on an International Baccalaureate exam paper.  Her second, Scarlet Tiger, won Templar Poetry’s Straid Collection Award for 2016, and in 2019 Ruth received a Society of Authors Foundation Grant to revisit South India – where she was born – and produce the poems for Rain Tree (Templar, 2022). She is currently working on a fourth collection.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad

The Artist’s Wife

After ‘Eliza in her Wedding Dress’

by James Paterson, PRSW, RSA, RWS

-       a Glasgow Boy

White of course, but shades   

of ivory and cream to consider,

many swatches of satin and silk.

Eliza appears padded and quilted,

a ruff around her neck, ruched

sleeves, a modest wedding dress.

James first painted her               

standing in the conservatory    

of their new home, Kilniess,

photographed his endeavour         

in black and white. She looks

calm and forthright.

In her hands, silken cords,

the bonds she embraces

facing the future.

Midsummer 1892

After James Guthrie

Edwardian in cream lace,

Maggie reclines in the garden

taking tea with friends,

her hair hooped up, complexion

pink as cherry blossom.

They’re a fashionable set

who sport smart feathered hats, 

though she demurs that day,

allowing her pale hair

to reflect the sun.

Her stylish dress merges

with the flecked yellow flowers.

That summer she’ll couch

their colour into silken embroideries

with the finest of thread.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad has three published pamphlets: Once there Was Colour (Palewell Press), Sleeping Under Clouds (Ckayhanger Press) and A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle/Vole). Widely published in print and online, Sue is a trustee of Suffolk Poetry Society, writes reviews and runs poetry workshops https://suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com

Trisha Broomfield 

Rainbow

You paint the sky

say goodbye in the only way,

as an artist, you know how

you don’t have the skill

still half-earthly bound,

though it will come,

to materialise smiling in blue shoes

you cannot, this soon

float a note of your perfume

across my room,

throw out our song from the radio

to catch my day-dreamed ear

or whisper my name

as I roll darkly in sleep

though you will,

so, you paint the sky

to say goodbye

because as an artist

you know how.

Trisha has three pamphlets (published by Dempsey and Windle) and contributed to many anthologies. Her latest, My Acrostic Mother, illustrated by Heather Moulson, is available to order online and at bookstores. All four pamphlets will be soon be available at the Surrey Poet Laureateship Library.

Trisha is poet for the monthly Cranleigh Magazine, the annual Caistorian, and one third of the Booming Lovelies poetry trio.

You can hear her poems at Poetry Worth Hearing and BBC Upload.

Instagram @magentapink22 @boominglovelies

 Terry Jones

Sitting in the garden after a death

You know how a ready-made phrase

Might surprise you and, out of nowhere,

alight on your head like a butterfly

that  cabbage white, say,

that is flickering against

the summer’s green -

the kind of commonplace

you would never write

outside quotation  marks -

a flash of wit on the reverse

of a full-colour post card

with its garish view.

But ‘wish you were here’ slips

unpunctuated from my lips

and I do.

Terry Jones former Competition Secretary, Newsletter editor and chair of Ver Poets. Member of Reading and Enfield Stanzas. Have lead workshops and discussion groups on Poetry Topics for many years. Former teacher and Careers Officer.

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 That's it for this month. Remember, the podcast can be found at https://open.spotify.com/episode/6bm5VF4GbeDLBY7UAqHxrz?si=TDsCMwlYR5CzC3t2puV5lw&nd=1&dlsi=0d94477b93c44254 or on You Tube, Audible or Spotify podcasts. Please listen and encourage others to discover PWH.

The theme for next month is 'weight'. Recordings of up to 4 minutes plus texts plus short author bio should be sent to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com by 18th May. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to the same email address.