Tag: Literature

  • A note from Olivia Guest at Jonathan Clowes Ltd.

    Doris Lessing died a matter of days after I had received permission to carry some of the poems from her Fourteen Poems on this site indefinitely. I had put up the following note and message and see no reason to remove it. I am happy that I have carried her work for a few years.  I wrote a…

  • Orphans from Poetry Ireland’s Forum

    Some years ago poets and emergent writers used a forum on Poetry Ireland for discussion, testing poetry, and commenting on the work of others. The idea was good, although the tech wasn’t so hot. After some discussion with the then Admin it was decided to have a place (not online) where poems could be published…

  • Previews of The Blind published in Ditch Poetry

    The following poem is an excerpt from a sequence published by Ditch Poetry. The sequence is from my forthcoming collection, The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013). Part of the Sequence is published here. The first poem in the sequence, hunger, appears throughout the collection and was first published in A New Ulster Magazine. suspend I   from…

  • “Marriage Advice, 1951” and “Waiting” by Mary O’Donnell

    Marriage Advice, 1951   Glossy women made her tremble, every word shiny and sure, we’re going to give Jenny a make-over, Jen, the decaying building, the clueless relic.   They made her sweat, even more, those women with Dior skirts and nipped-in waists, who warned the night before the wedding about being prepared.   But it was…

  • Bone Orchard Poetry, a blogzine for working poets and writers

    Bone Orchard Poetry is variously active on discussion sites and uses social-media well. This is what writers refer to as bloody good innovative web-use. Editor Michael McAloran keeps the blogzine brief in description, ‘ An explorative blogzine of the Bleak/ the Surreal/ the Dark/ Absurd and the Experimental. ‘ There you have it encapsulated in a single…

  • On ‘Two Songs of War and a Lyric’

    This year I wrote a cycle of poems relating to war and to women. I titled part of it Two Songs of War and a Lyric for the SouthWord Journal, although it is intimately related to an earlier sequence of art poems, and to the 75th anniversary of Guernica which was marked in 2012.  The…

  • Poems from ‘Mindskin’ by Antonella Zagaroli

    from Fan-Locked (2001-2004) The sun embroiders the hinges on the door Fan-locked the woman with the curdled breast mirrors the colours one by one mortifies their harmony with blood between her thighs She’s jealous of every new whim kneads her tongue with hankerings for salt Replies without eyes to a world in silence   Fan-Locked is…

  • ‘Sabine’ by C. Murray

    Morning, and his rust-coloured shadow is cast onto the floor, beneath it the stone flags show their cracks and flaws, they are brown maroonish or black. That he may come in to wound her that he may come in to love her is the same thing. There are two pots There are bowls, there is…

  • And Other Poems

    This is a brief note about the And Other Poems blog which is owned and written by Josephine Corcoran. What a breath of fresh air the blog is, judging by contemporary availability of good poetry (and critique). To say that poetry is sorely neglected in the face of market-forces is a wild understatement, but more polemic anon. “And…

  • The difficulty with muses

    It seems that muses, those shadowy goddesses who influence writers, are limited under current editorial and employment injunctions to give inspiration alone to great male poets. Or so Simon Gough would have us believe. Muses apparently perform some type of quasi-sexual inspirational function and it doesn’t matter if they are girls or boys, once the poet…