Publications

Getting there

At the halfway mark, it feels
as if you’re falling apart.
Roadchef offers great deals
on donuts, call this number now
on the back of toilet doors,

then roadworks where
no-one’s working, slick yachts
in an urban harbour, stop-starts
through stop-go traffic, scraps
of sea at street-ends

and the blue sweep of bay,
its skipping kite-surfers, its slop
of small waves, ahead
the pebble bank’s grumble
and in the sunset, cliffs
brassy as trumpets.

Sharon Phillips

Sharon’s poems have been published in print and online. She won the Borderlines Poetry Competition in 2017, was among the winners of the Poetry Society Members’ Competition in November 2018 and was Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize (2019). Sharon has recently moved to Otley, in West Yorkshire, from the Isle of Portland. She tweets as @sharoncowling and more information can be found here ~ https://outtograss.wordpress.com/

Photo credit ~ @redzeppelin at http://www.unsplash.com

Oystercatchers

One day
the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take her words with her to the sea
unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely
as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky
and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell
giving her permission

Deborah Harvey

Oystercatchers, won the 2018 Plough Prize short poem competition, judged by Pascale Petit, and was inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg).

Deborah Harvey’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies, broadcast on Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and awarded several major prizes. Her poetry collections, The Shadow Factory (2019), Breadcrumbs (2016), Map Reading for Beginners (2014), and Communion (2011), are published by Indigo Dreams, while her historical novel, Dart, appeared under their Tamar Books imprint in 2013.

Deborah tweets as @DeborahEHarvey
Facebook ~ https://www.facebook.com/Deborah.Harvey.Writer/
Instagram ~ @deborah_harvey_poet
Website ~ https://theleapingword.com/

Photo credit ~ @jordaneil at http://www.unsplash.com

PUFFINS AT COQUET ISLAND

Partygoers reluctant to depart.
Last stragglers of the colony line
the turf below the lighthouse.
The engine’s cut; August
wind chills faces. Some still
clump in, puttering outboard
motors frantically clattering
over us and terns on the rocks.

Wintering on the ocean,
returning with sandeel cargos.
The chicks spend years at sea.
What makes us think of them
as doleful, painted clowns,
our island trip an end-of-pier show?
You’re lucky to see them, the boatman says.
By rights they should be gone.

Greg Freeman

Greg Freeman is a former newspaper sub-editor, and is now news and reviews editor for the poetry website Write Out Loud. His debut pamphlet collection, Trainspotters, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2015. He tweets @gregfreempoet

Photo credit by Paul Gallagher at Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/92694300@N08/39774328243/in/photostream/

From the Fast Train

Across the firth cloudbanks rise
like mountains: a Caucasus range
transported, whipped into whiteness.

Sunlight blinks on the far shore,
the mild hills rise and fall, a roll
of paper scenery opening as we move.

In the salt-spumed distance the land
is misty, painted in the muted, formal
tones of those old holiday advertisements

that showed us summer heat: resinous pines,
mimosa and sharp agaves, their flower stems
leaning over improbable intensities of blue.

Hikers crossing shadowed fells, buckets
and spades scattered on spotless sands,
Arcadias that lay just beyond our reach.

At the estuary’s mouth the coastline ends.
Now it’s steep winter fields, earth steel-turned
for sowing, herring gulls and lichened walls.

Imogen Forster

Imogen Forster has been writing and publishing poems for the past seven years. She completed an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University in 2017, and has a collection on the verge of being ready to submit to publishers. She lives in Edinburgh and tweets @ForsterImogen

Photo credit; @dannyeve at http://www.unsplash.com

Taking Tea with the Bal Maidens

As seabed-boulders roll
over their heads, metalliferous
seams creak and scream.

‘There’s plenty of ‘sten’
the miners call to them
on the surface, who lift,
haul, pick, break, sep-
arate the ore, to find
the crack that binds the tin.

As they dress the ore,
they chant, sing, and sip
from a flask of mugwort tea.

Alison Lock

Alison Lock’s writing focuses on the relationship of humans and the environment connecting an inner world with an exploration of land and sea. Her most recent publications are a short story collection A Witness of Waxwings, Cultured Llama Press (2017); and Revealing the Odour of Earth, Calder Valley Poetry (2017). You can read more here; http://www.alisonlock.com Tweeting as @alilock4

Photo credit; Pinterest.co.uk/www.westernmorningnews.co.uk

Bio

Colin Bancroft is currently in exile in the North Pennines, working on his first poetry collection and a PhD on the Eco-poetics of Robert Frost. He tweets as @colin_bancroft

Photo credit; Visit Wales https://www.visitwales.com/en-us/product/527821