It’s OK, there wasn’t a blog for January 2025. Or a poem of the month.
Why? Because it was cold and dark and mostly wet here where I live, and I hibernated. However, I did do some Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw and get some poetry done despite needing recovery time from recent political events….
So this is the first blog of the 2025 and I have decided on a new look. A quick Google search about refreshing your blog style suggests writing about your passions. Mine are poetry, politics and gardening, in other words a wide variety of topics for readers to choose from who visit my website. Here goes!
Poetry first, last and always
Inspirations this month have been an hour with Malika Booker on the Writing Hours about lyric poetry. She took a look at the Ghazal and also at the contemporary interpretation of lyric through the work of poets including Patricia Smith, Anne Cameron, Danez Smith, Mimi Khalvati and Aga Ali Shahid. All of them worth a Google search. I have started to read Karen Solie’s The Caiplie Caves in anticipation of her new collection due out in April, already ordered.
Submissions and opportunities It was lovely to be contacted by Joy Howard of Grey Hen Press about her forthcoming anthologies and invited to submit poems. At the moment I am working on my long-neglected collection for a re-think over the next few months.
What’s next? Coming up in February a return to the film script for my collaboration with Elaine Brown, in the hope that if the weather improves and we can do some outdoor filming soon. Also the Lancaster LitFest is coming up in March and hey, guess what? Malika Booker is reading here in Lancaster. There is also other poetry stuff to go to, so I’m looking forward to it.
Politics is very much a preoccupation these days as we watch the world being shaken by events and wait anxiously every day to see what the latest nightmare is visited on us by the rich white men in power. I have come to think that writing about it might be a way of making sense of it all, it that is possible. This will be my task and a way of dealing with it.
The poem of the month this month celebrates the 2nd of February Candlemas, Imbolc and Groundhog Day.Gardening. Right now I am plucking up the courage to get to the allotment to sow seeds, but every day I tell myself. ‘it’s too cold today, maybe tomorrow.’