A month of poetry - and the Buzzwords Poetry Competition 2022

September's been a busy month, seeing the submission of my dissertation, and with it, the end of my MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Writing School. I decided to apply after my mother went to live with my sister in Nottingham for the last couple of years of her life, and I suddenly found myself with a lot more free time. Now all that's left to do is wait for the result of my dissertation, and then the release of my overall mark. I've really enjoyed rediscovering my inner swot, and will miss her and my studies once I've graduated. (Unless I go on to study for a PhD. We'll have to see.)

September was also very busy with regard to poetry readings; in fact, I ended up doing more in one month than the preceding two and a half years, starting with four readings over the course of one weekend at the University of Bristol's Botanic Garden Bee and Pollination Festival. Reading with me were two of my fellow IsamBards, Pameli Benham and David Johnson. 

I also had the pleasure of being one of the guest poets at the Berkeley Square Poetry Review in Clifton, and at Uncut Poets at Exeter Phoenix, along with Dominic Fisher. 

My seventh reading of the month, again as guest poet with Dominic Fisher, was pre-recorded for West Wilts Radio, courtesy of Dawn Gorman's The Poetry Place. The programme, with many excellent open-mic readings, is available to listen to here.

My final reading of the month was perhaps the most personally satisfying of all, as it was for Silver Street Poetry, the open mic I used to run with my partner, Colin Brown, before the pandemic put a stop to such things. Since then we've had a prolonged search for a more spacious venue than our old haunt, and have found a warm welcome at St Stephen's Church, just off Bristol City Centre, which not only has an excellent Spanish cafe, but also mermaids! 

I'll be running the event from now on with Dominic, Pat Simmons and Rosalie Alston, as Colin is currently working in Cardiff. We'll be booking some excellent guest poets in the months ahead. In the meantime it was great to dip my toes in the warm (as it turned out) waters of viability, a mere two and a half years after I was slated to read in April 2020. 

And my best poetry news for the month came in an email from the organisers of the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry  Competition to say that my sequence of poems, Conversations with Silence, from my most recent project, Love the Albatross, had won second prize, which is all kinds of pleasing. Thanks very much to judge, Nigel McLoughlin.   

The 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize

A suspicious sales-type phone call yesterday evening turned out to be nothing of the sort - instead, I learnt that my sequence, Speaking Raven, has won the 2013 Gloucestershire Poetry Prize (for residents of the ancestral county of Gloucestershire), courtesy Buzzwords, and so takes a final lap of honour here.    

The first part is about watching a pair of ravens flying over the Grwyne Fawr valley in the Black Mountains; the second is in the voice of the raven who, in North American mythology, created the World; and the third is a bit of one-upmanship between the Norse God Odin’s two ravens, whose names translate as Thought and Memory. 

Speaking Raven

I Grwyne Fawr

Sheep have spread their shrunken 

woollens on barbed wire fences,

wisps bleached white by winter sun

imitating lichen hung on blackthorn

twigs to dry.

Delighted by pattern

the wind sends a pair of ravens overhead. 

It thinks they sound like frogs

but to me it’s clear that they are

deep in conversation

their topic a worsening in the weather,

the move of the livestock market

from Abergavenny to Raglan.

Or so I imagine, 

not speaking raven.

II   Light-Bringer

Black with repentance?  Me?

Everything you see I created –  

these hills and rivers, those distant clouds

that might be mountains

I circled the world,

my feathers shed forests

With my beak I mined diamonds 

gritted the slippery sky

While you were blindfolded

and stumbling

I shoved the sun up the chimney

giving birth to Day

My dirt-dark laugh

regurgitates morning

Nights, I spread my wings, my iris

the tireless moon

III  Thought and Memory

Once there were gods

and we served them.  Now we are 

masters of four winds

Feathers and bone, we are the fearless,

tumbling funambulists

stepping on air

There’s more than one darkness.

We are the dark of the shortest day

falling through spring

Mornings

our wings make sooty marks

across the camber of the sky

In our feathers all things are mingled.

We have four and sixty

changings of the voice.

We love to bark like happy dogs

rolling in cloud

waggling our tails

We’re not the souls of fallen soldiers.

We don’t act as omens,

foretellers of doom

Flapping rags and blackened paper,

we are debris at the edges

of the storm

Thanks to judge, David Morley, and all at Buzzwords. 

(There is a raven in the above photo, honest, it's soaring, wings outstretched, over the Dart gorge.)