Mindfulness   Imagine truly being in the present, Our every thought upon a plane like one Mapped out by Euclid. Here, the garden sun Is eight minutes old and there is a pleasant Sense of valediction to the moment, As the moment leaves us like a houseguest: Bags stowed, she is…

        The pool below the oak   Remember this: a driftway brimming cow parsley, bramble, its green beaded fruits; the field into which we clamber over wire, balance each other; that pool below the oak, black and bitter with tannins, where the cattle come to lap; the lack of breeze; the oak, its…

image © Marlon James       The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus   He looks at me and sees right through me, as if I am nothing, as if he could live without me. I bathed him each day, moistly kissing the rise of his flesh, slapping his limbs then falling away, down…

  Oliver writes: These are part of a ‘calendar’ of 12 poems set in Pitshanger Park, near where I live in Ealing. The Park is a place of leisure, but also a setting where small and large histories play out and which is not protected from the mayhem around.           Evening Clouds…

        Re: Application FAO Dr Bob Pintle Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University and also dedicated to Dr Andrew Taylor, who did not inspire the poem   Dear Robert, The Board regrets to inform several colleagues, including you, that your recent sabbatical applications will not go forward, after review. The panel felt…

        Chance: a dream   Yes. It was you. From its small source my heart rushed like a flooded beck. But would you lead a writing course? Or choose a tweed with purple check? The others sat, to write and learn. It was too late to learn. Instead I wandered out of your…

    it’s hard at first to comprehend the sleeping man so horizontal all through the day so sleepy despite the hours spent seemingly at rest but like a meadow glimpsed from speeding train of course there are permanent convulsions beneath the topsoil of your matted hair love what horses are at work on you…

Below are two poems from Lisa Kelly’s debut collecton A Map Towards Fluency, recently published by Carcanet. Colchester Native Oysters shucked. Poor man’s beef discardeddown guts and out again to sea. Shells salvaged.Here, concentrated behind wire mesh, hard stuffingfor this upholstered seat placed for musingon the river Colne. Quantities shipped oncircuitous routes to sate Elizabethan…

          Allotment Evening   You left the fire burning. The smoke stirred like a person moving among the brassicas and twine, and for a moment we thought it was you. The ground was steeped in yellow. Daffodils hung their soft heads, surrounded by light, and I lifted the tender net on the…

          Alfreton Town 0, Brackley Town 1 (89’)   for Lloyd Pettiford and Adam Tocock   The pitch is white where the sun’s not been seen on its hill-cresting flight. The tea queue is long and shrouded in breath, as men in fat coats grunt at each other, though the game’s going…

        Glossa   (in response to M. Eminescu)   Remember how you starfished your way across the pool of infinity bay how you and paradise made eye contact beyond the winding slide’s colorful digestive tract how the clouds were milky pterodactyls in the sky how you met the ocean’s eye how you spun…

  James Peake’s debut collection, Reaction Time of Glass, will be published by Two Rivers Press on 21st July. Below are four poems by James, including, from the book, ‘Marine Snow, Hammersmith’.         Marine Snow, Hammersmith   The flyover this late is less than human, the only evident affection drops from the sodium…

        The Flower Carrier   after the painting by Diego Rivera, 1935   These blooms are for the mayor’s daughter, wedding on which a town pins its hopes. Soon they’ll set long tables creaking, throng streets in hanging baskets, thread buttonholes of businessmen, diplomats. If I were a cynic I’d call them fig…

        Big Talk   ‘when the mystics speak of worlds beyond scent and colour, the common man… cannot grasp their reality.’ ~ Rumi   Cosmologists say, ‘if the sun was a door, the earth would be the size of a dime’. And I try to envision the vastness that I love — a…

        Blood in the Sky   A mortar attack hit a new condominium, built just a year ago, mixing lost lives with debris, gnawed by merciless, rat-like flames. A general ordered a small detachment to kill “a couple hundred civilians” just to discredit his enemies’ army. By chaos and fear, he wanted to…

  Below is a poem from Declan Ryan’s new pamphlet, Fighters, Losers, published this week by New Walk Editions and available to buy here. Declan will be launching his pamphlet at Five Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham this Thursday evening, 23rd May, alongside Linda Stern Zisquit and her pamphlet From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter. Event…

        Dream Lover   Next to a Spanish river, I tell him my body is ruined. Not existing, he doesnʼt mind: I like your differences. With metallic water, time unravels blue streets, silver mohicans ‒ theyʼre palm trees − behind them, tall town houses of the belonging children. Be careful what you wish…

©Paul Stuart         Rhiannon   1   One evening, having dined in my estate Among my many men, merry and wise, I took the air outside the palace, late In the day, but not too late to lift my eyes To where the sun still spun his daily heat Down the tall hill…

         Notes From Sarajevo   …a bullet in flight bears no sound   The city’s empty but for wind varying shades of darkness a woman kneeling under a briar from here she seems to be hiding if the shrub had a voice it would sing for water she’s found a crook in its…

        Another Language   When I speak in Cantonese, I’m almost a different person. Louder, brighter. The seven tones, ascending, descending like musical notes. My grandparents, leaving the fragrant harbour of Hong-Kong, the Pearl River of Guang-Zhou for the dream of a better life in the West – what did they make of…