An interview with Ian, in which he discusses themes explored in the following poems, is up concurrently on Wild Court here.         Jarrow March   Instead of revolution we have rain: it seeps into the English soil and permeates our lives. Some stayed at home and made the pit-wheel turn, some manned…

  The following is an extract from Book of Days, a long poem recounting a journey along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. This extract describes the sixth day of the walk, from the city of Pamplona to Uterga.     6 from Pamplona The streets still grey with night. On…

Left: Aldershot striker Mike Ring (16 goals in 76 appearances) with a diving header Right: Midfielder Ian McDonald, flanked by Bill Shankly, signing for Liverpool before his Shots days (340 apps)   Aldershot FC Footballers of the 1980s         3 – Ian Phillips   Shaven-headed but for straw-blond sideburns, signed on a free…

Photo by Dovi on Unsplash         The Southern Belle   In 1812, when the building was first built, they infused the wallpaper with beetroot juice, to achieve the notorious burgundy colour fashionable in most Southern public houses.   When the glasses have been polished to the point of invisibility, and the barrels have…

    Photo by Jack Douglass on Unsplash            Somerset County Cold Case Photo, 1980   Shot from its stoop, this garden shed brims March, a ripe compendium of glistenings—yellow packets of seeds like solitaire across its workbench, new gloves still tagged. The pegboard’s collars shine the throats of screwdrivers by size, two…

        Anosmia   ‘The natural world is not kind.’ – ‘How viruses shape the world’, The Economist (22nd August 2020)   I live to smell the flowers. I’d measured out my day in scents and my life in garden fragrances: yellow primroses in March, white lilacs in May, philadelphus in June. All that…

Chris Balderstone in action for Carlisle United and England           The Last Corinthians   for Ann and Peter Sansom   A cricket bat slumped at the back of my father’s shed preserves the faintest whiff of linseed oil. Faded GM on its splice denotes the makers: Gunn and Moore, co-founded by Billy…

        claim your ghost   for sophie   a night of solitude by the river driftwood floating through the distance thinking back to the time before you were born when the willow’s branches were lines of unblemished philosophy winding backwards through time to the moment before you were born the willow’s leaves grow…

        Meccano Magazine   Bridge May Riordan ordered it for me From London. Being educational, It was exempt from the 2d Purchase Tax, Which was ironic because, in the reading Of instructions, I was ineducable. The sons of the Creamery Manager, Who also had Set 5, completed models So they always came out…

    The below poems are taken from John Challis’s debut collection, The Resurrectionists, forthcoming from Bloodaxe this month.         There’s been talk   of a child born on Cheapside with a wolf’s tail and goat’s breasts, of Quakers down Cannon Street with pans of fire on their heads, and months ago, in…

        In Memoriam Alun Lewis   1915-1944   From India you wrote of coming back and that isolation for youth to breathe and grow. Later when the history books were updated and maps became the colour of rainbows, warm letters home once written between breaks in the clouds floated like bruised poppies on…

    Photo by Henrik Hjortshøj on Unsplash            The Stillness of the Cows   While summer’s delaying, they doze and graze, ruminate over landscapes all day, lie side by side and gaze across fields, content (or a milk cow’s equivalent) with sunshine, warm rain, the shade of a hedge and acres of…

        Toll   I hear the accusations like the Lutine Bell: nostalgie de la boue or blood and soil; found poetry or cento. Nonetheless it makes the Mersey look like churned-up mud, the curt cuts of an accent awaken roots inside my parents’ head. After the long drive north from the flat lands…

        The Insomniac’s Mouth   drones like a cave ululating the breeze of an unmoored summer night. In a hotel room his lover waits, the city’s roads sliming the barrenness of tongue. In his mind’s posterior, anticipation acquires memorability, irrespective of consequence. Hairs on his forearm sprawl outside the frame like threads uncoiling…

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash           Compass point   Compass north can wander many miles apart from true north, and it alters every year; so explorers travelling to the Pole must start by drawing on their map a line that shows in clear detail the effect of magnetism’s range. Then, compensating…

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash            Lines in rock   Words say waters flow rocks weather ferns wither winds blow times go – Kathleen Raine, ‘Night in Martindale’   On an Ullswater shore a poet’s words carved in rock; I brush away oak leaves and read in the rain light her…

        Santa Maria del Popolo   They are listening underfoot here, filigree-tongued and built with bones crowding from centuries of faltering tombs. Childhood compels me to lift the Latin hiding in marble-dry corners of the mouth. I drop a reluctant euro to hear the filament click, releasing a private light. Saint Peter, all…

        Patwá   When I was a young boy, Sundays spoke a strange tongue: Jesus and his gang of bells, the cry of the rag’n bone man clip-clopping down our street, and sometimes I’d hear fascists, communists, feminists and anarchists at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. But it was the Patwá my father…

        Arrival   I. Julie shouts from her second-floor window I HAVE THE COUNCIL ON SPEED DIAL IF YOU CAUSE ANY TROUBLE and this plastic-clad pile becomes home. II. Julie’s German Shepherd howls as I unpack a five-tog duvet, free the dying wasp. Examine suspect stains on the curtain hem and run knuckles…