The title of my first published pamphlet, (a chapbook for Hen Run/Grey Hen 2012) is Gardening with my Father and the title poem was my poem of the month in 2017.  My dad died when I was 23 and I took up gardening when I retired. So I have gardened without my father for over 20 years. Yet sometimes when the greenhouse is filled with the warm sweet smell of ripening g tomatoes I can feel him with me.

Me question for this month’s blog is what should a gardener do in the presence of climate breakdown? My tentative answer is the same as for a poet, as I wrote in a previous blog:  observe, record and adapt.

My allotment has given me a microcosmic view of the effects of climate breakdown. This year it is twenty years since I got the allotment, just a short wheelbarrow push from my house. In that time I have noted warmer winters with less snow and ice and wetter early springs followed by very hot late springs in April and May when the plants are taking off. Gradually every year I have tried to he more prepared to deal with the change.

I have recorded these  observations in my allotment notebook but also have done so in a number of poems, some about the allotment gardening specifically and the wonderful characters who inhabit that world,  and some about the wider impact of  climate breakdown on the city where I live and its surrounding countryside in terms of the storms that we have experienced.

Like all gardeners I am obsessed with the weather but now I watch and adapt accordingly even more closely. I put my greenhouse shading up sooner and harden off my young plants  in the shade, have got more dedicated about regularly watering and maintained the gardeners’ age old philosophy which is about taking nature as it comes and embracing its glories at every moment.

To end on a cheerful note: when I took copies of the chapbook to the local tourist information centre they offered to sell some. When I returned a week later I couldn’t find them, only to discover they had put them in the gardening section. They took some persuading that they were poetry books not gardening advice, but now looking back I find the overlap perhaps greater than the distinction. Certainly both activities nourish my creativity even in these dark times.  

Poem of the month is The Fruit Grower from the pamphlet and I hope it illustrates for you the delights of allotment gardening both as a hobby and as a community to enjoy.

My reading life

I am reading Karen Solie again very slowly, taking time over each poem and also enjoying 100 Poems to Save the Earth an anthology (Zoe Brigley and Kristain Evans eds., Seren 2021).  The first poem, The Creel, by Kathleen Jamie is worth a look. It is published on the Seren blog for World Earth Day 2022.

In prose I am still reading Domination by Alice Roberts, a fascinating archaeological perspective on the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity its wake. I have started on Laurence Rees’s The Nazi Mind (Penguin 2026), which is both illuminating and depressing in equal parts.

My writing life

I have at last managed to get back to my poetry magazine submissions chart and submit to three magazines in the last couple of months but no Hare in the headlights just now. This is time of solid grind with more headlights in the future I hope.

‘til next time…

Soon after I wrote my last blog, Storm Goretti devastated the west of England and the south of Wales, with connected severe weather in Scotland. Where I live, so close to the Irish sea coast, we seem to have escaped the worst of it. However, yesterday I saw footage showing the devastation on St Michael’s Mount off the Cornish coast.  They have lost a hundred trees. Hearing this made me feel angry and sad.

Today as I write we are hearing of the great ice storm traveling across the United States while the president says it proves the earth is cooling not warming, because the storm has ice. In truth the Arctic vortex has moved and the warming in the Arctic has caused the storm.

I have turned, as ever, to poetry for consolation. It was great to hear this week that Karen Solie’s Wellwater (Picador 2025) has won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize for this year. I read the collection through at the end of last year and now I am returning for a second more attentive reading. The title of this month’s blog is the last line of the first poem in the collection Basement Suite.

I decided to put aside the environmental horrors on screens of every kind, despite the imminence of storm Ingrid. I looked around me this morning and spent a little time in the back garden. I noticed that the bulbs are up early and we have our first yellow crocus. It is, of course a joy to see it, but it is also a bit scarily early to see a crocus in January.

Looking around is about noticing what is actually happening and also imagining what is to come. To quote Solie:

The trees are grand hotels, closed for the season.
But underground, social life is taking place.
(from The Trees in Riverside  Park)  

My reading life

This last month has included of course the books I received as presents over Christmas. I am still reading Domination by Alice Roberts (an account of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity), another slow read, and waiting for my wife to finish her book about the Neanderthals (Kindred, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes). Something about the remote past and imagining how people lived is endlessly fascinating for me.

We are just beginning to resume our poetry at the kitchen table after a break while we had guests, and assumed perhaps mistakenly that they would not necessarily enjoy it. More of that next time when we are back in the swing of it

My writing life

Honestly, not much poetry has got written although I did start today with one for the forthcoming stanza on the 5^th February.  However, I have been sorting out my books and came across Judy Reeves’ A writer’s book of days, published in 1997 and probably purchased by me early this century as I returned to my writing life after retiring. I have used it in the past as a source of prompts, but this time I have paused to look more closely at what it  has to offer.

Although the book offers a prompt for each day it is actually about encouraging daily writing practice and much of Reeves’ wisdom is relevant now, especially since, having finished the draft of my collection, I hit a bit of a blank spot. Each chapter contains lots of good ideas for getting your writing going and keeping at it with a daily practice session in response to the prompt, not just free writing but actually making you write to the suggested topic. I am not religious about it but I try to be faithful and do it as often as my life allows. 

Hare in the headlights

No headlights coming up this moth but who knows what may drop into my inbox. I am reviving my submissions to magazines chart starting tis week. I will let you ko how it goes.

That’s it for now ..

So spoke Chris Packham, one of the country’s most prominent and most uncompromising environmental activists, in an interview with Amol Rajan as part of the latter’s series for Radio 4 and iPlayer Radicals.

I have to admit that hearing him say this shook me up. I decided that the next few blogs, the first few of 2026  will be about this most pressing of issues. It seems to me that  the world is so preoccupied  with other things, war, immigration, economics etc.  that perhaps it is easy to forget that the survival of our civilisations depends on the way we approach this problem more than any other. If the climate really is at breaking point then this should surely be our first and paramount concern. The question comes back at once, what does a poet, or any artist, do to help, where do we start?   

There is no shortage of nature and environmental poetry out there and the first daunting problem I encountered  is how to say something that has not been said before.

For now I will leave the poets aside, and turn to the activists and hear what they have to say.

At COP30 in Brazil in November 2025 activist Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez (quoted in The Guardian) identified four truths that I have summarised here:

We have more than doubled greenhouse gas emissions instead of cutting them. We’re on a pathway to assassinate half of all living creatures.

We don’t need more reports, dialogues, committees of experts, roundtables. We need action.

It is all one crisis; the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the land crisis, the ocean crisis, the plastic pollution crisis.

We are literally paying criminals to kill us. We’re giving subsidies to fossil fuel producers, when we know everything they produce kills us, quickly or slowly.

We live in a political climate of denial where rich men deny these truths in their own self interest and all of us (and by “all of us” we mean every living thing) suffer.

I hope for a year in which we will hear loud voices shouting the truth, dispelling the hatred and division, calling for action on climate breakdown. As Lauren Zunica writes in her wonderful poem Everything is Going to be Amazing:

This is the year of ‘Quit the Dumb Shit.’

Let’s do just that!

My reading life

Among my birthday and Christmas presents this year were the new collection by Deryn Rees Jones, Hôtel Amour (Seren 2025). I met Deryn  some years ago when she ran a Ty Newydd course I attended and I joined her launch for this collection on Zoom. More of this next month when I have read it. My other book present was Alice Robert’s Domination. (I have a secret passion for archaeology and history.)

My writing life

has been on hold in December as I celebrated a significant birthday and Christmas: a busy and enjoyable time. However my new Mslexia diary has forced me back to thinking about writing and yesterday, New Year’s Day I began. 

Hare in the headlights 

Nothing specific to report as I have been having a break. This is very good thing to let myself do and not feel guilty about not writing..

‘Bye for now  

and take responsibility for it. This month’s title is paraphrased from the book I have just finished reading, Timothy Scheider’s On Freedom.

It is simple, yes, but not simplistic, and pertinent because this month I want to talk about immigration. You may well ask what has this to do with my life, or yours, as a poet? I will refer you at once to Benjamin Zephania’s poem The British. In his recipe style description of the richness of our country, he reminds us of the diversity of our culture here in Britain, and that we are all of us migrants.

Some years ago, I gave a talk in a community centre to a group of about 40 people. I started by asking everyone to raise a hand if they were born in the UK, and most people did. Then I asked them to lower their hands if their parents were not born in the UK. A few did, then I asked the same question about grandparents, a lot more hands went down and then great grandparents, at which point there were hardly any hands left raised.

While I worked for eight years for a charity helping asylum seekers and refugees, I felt a strong need to write, and specifically to write poems, about my encounters with them. It was difficult to decide how to approach the subject as a white woman and a British citizen, without feeling condescending and intrusive. What could I presume to know of their culture and their experiences? Over the time of writing those poems I found a way. I avoided making assumptions about the people I met, and often, but not always, addressed them in the second person.

So, if we are all migrants from somewhere, then migration itself is not a problem. Yet every day we are bombarded with the far-right narrative that asylum seekers and refugees are to blame for the state of the country, for the cost of living, the NHS near collapse, and the housing crisis. Punitive policies from a supposedly socialist government reinforce these lies.

For me to do the right thing is to use the form of poetry, led by the glorious voice of Benjamin Zephaniah, to refute these lies, the do what I know is right and accept responsibility for the consequences and so to speak out a s a free person. The first poem I wrote about refugees is the poem of the month, Lunchtime Stories, which was published in my 2019 pamphlet, Testimony.

My writing life

All the last few months have been devoted to the development of my proposed collection and a couple of weeks ago I completed the initial setting out and structure of the book. The next thing I have to do is proofread and format and then apply for some money to get a professional edit and move on towards publication. It is long and arduous journey, but I feel I am well on the way at last.

Other than that, I have managed to wite a few poems, spurred on by the need to take something to the monthly stanza meeting on the first Thursday of every month, which comes round frighteningly quickly!

My reading life (poetry at the kitchen table)

The book mentioned above on freedom is a big read and has taken me ages to get through, but brimming with inspiration and ideas. Well worth it. The kitchen table has been a bit sporadic lately but we have taken a bit of look at T.S Eliot, (whose poem The Hollow Men sees its centenary this year) and gone on to the collected poems of Seamus Heaney.  Away from the kitchen table I have just finished Karen Solie’s Well Water. This last collection needs time to digest, so maybe I will be able to offer some thoughts on it next time.

Hare in the Headlights.

The much-anticipated Stanza Bonanza organised by the National Poetry Society took place on Thursday 27^th November on Zoom, where I read with two other poets from our group: Carole Coates and David Canning, alongside three poets for the Blackpool and Fylde group and number of open mic contributions. It was a good evening and a real opportunity for me to share some poems on an environmental theme.    

I hope everyone has a good break over Christmas time and see you all next year.

This description of the way the Roman Empire’s expansion left devastation in its wake was quoted by Tacitus in his work Agricola from the  speech of a Caledonian leader rallying  his troops against Rome in what is now the borders of Scotland. It was quoted in an article in the Guardian after Trump’s peace deal in Gaza was announced.

Obviously all of us are preoccupied  with the continuing horrors in Gaza and the threats from Russia against Ukraine, all of us have been feeling helpless in the face of the horror. These wars fill the news headlines day after day. Always alongside them are the lies and half truths, the constant attacks from social media, a discourse of division and hatred, an attack on our concept of reality and democracy, and the unending public discourse about the failure of  politicians.

So in this month’s blog I set out to ponder on what the role of a poet might be in these times. I have been given lately to ranting about it, at the dinner table and when spending time with friends. Reading two poems made me realise that now is the time to to write not rant.

You may recall that after the Prime Minister’s use of the phrase island of strangers, about what our politicians choose to see as the problem of immigration, Michael Rosen wrote a poem celebrating the NHS, using that phrase as its title and describing how people from all over the world had saved his life when he had Covid. In his poem he embraced and celebrated the ‘strangers’ who helped him.

The second source of inspiration came only this week when it was announced that Abeer Amer, a Welsh poet of Iraqi descent, had won the Forward Prize for the single poem, with her poem, At Least. Abeer sets us an example in her beautiful lament for the children trapped in Gaza.

These two wonderful writers have given me a choice. I don’t need to rant, instead I can  write poems of celebration and lament. I can offer my own contribution to a discourse among poets and artists everywhere in the hope of being heard. I invite poets who read this blog to join me. Tell me what you want to celebrate and what you feel you need to lament in response to this blog.

The poem of the month this month is a celebratory poem Clapping, written in 2020.

My writing life

This month has seen a degree of progress towards preparing the my first full collection. After advice from Zoe (Brigley) and Rhian (Edwards) at their course in Ty Newydd in July,  I have sent poems to five magazine for inclusion. I have also spent time with my poems for the collection spread out on the dining room table in order to create the order which will give the best narrative of the work. I am now about to embark on the ‘fingertip’ edit and careful scrutiny. The above has not left a lot of time for the creation of new work, so that’s on the back burner for now. 

My reading life (poetry at the kitchen table)

We have finished the Elizabeth Burns posthumous collection the Lightkeepers and Iris Lewis’ Amber. After a short break to visit friends, we are about to embark on TS Eliot’s Collected Poems (well why not?) starting with The Waste Land  from my copy published in 1974 as a ‘Faber paper covered edition’ purchased for the princely sum of £1.20 and no doubt worth every penny! I will let you know how we get on next time…  

Hare in the Headlights  

Much to tell. Having read at the local King Street studio with members of my Stanza group in September, the next reading was in Kendal on the 14^th of October at an event organised by Joy Howard to raise money for Save the Children in Gaza. I read at an open mic slot and the event raised £250 for the charity.

In November on the 27^th I shall be reading as part of the Lancaster Stanza Group in a Stanza Bonanza with Blackpool and Fylde group. The event will be on Zoom and I will send the link out the day before when we receive it from the National Poetry Society.

And finally I heard yesterday that Mslexia have accepted a poem for their December edition which I submitted to their poetry challenge.      

That’s it for now..

It is the 4^th of May 2019, a lovely sunny day here for our local City Council elections. I am volunteering at a local church community centre, where we are welcoming approximately two hundred newly arrived asylum seekers who have been accommodated in a local budget hotel.  I am walking down to the local hygiene bank to collect donations of toiletries for  them, as they have nothing with them and no money to buy anything.

I am accompanied by a young man from Eritrea who had arrived about a week previously. His English is good and as we walk he asks me about the local elections, what they are, what they mean and how they are different from general elections. I explain who we can vote for and what they do and he listens intently.  On the way back when I have finished explaining, he smiles and says ‘I love this country’. He is so happy to be here, to have escaped the tyranny and conflict that is destroying his country, to have found somewhere where there is freedom.

Things have changed a lot since then. The hotels in our city are no longer used as accommodation for asylum seekers. A couple of weeks ago a young man from Eritrea was refused asylum and returned to France because he came across the channel in a small rubber boat.

I too still love this country, but then I am one of the lucky ones who has a right to stay. I also weep for it, as we see so much division, fear and  hatred between us and our fellow human beings fleeing war and  persecution. For me it is important, and my way of trying to p the record straight, to talk about the many people I met over more than eight years of working with asylum seekers and refugees. They were ordinary people with families and lives they wanted to live in the freedom our country has to offer. Therefore my poem of the month is:

Poem of the month October 2025

Getting Here(first published in my second Wayleave pamphlet in 2021). Go to Poem of the Month page 

My writing life

Has been taken up with revising and editing poems for magazine submissions. I have recently subscribed to Robin Houghton’s monthly list of submissions windows for poetry magazines and  September is a busy month. So only one new poem this month which I took to the Stanza group. I have made a note to myself to try to write some more soon. In the maelstrom of political violence, climate change and economic uncertainty it is, to say the least, hard to know where to start. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem that appeared in the Guardian the other day, State/Banquet says everything there is to be said about the recent state visit (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/17/carol-ann-duffy-writes-bombsite-poem-about-trumps-uk-state-visit).

My reading life

While I read fiction on my Kindle, when it comes to non-fiction books I like a real paper one and at the moment I am reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom (Penguin Random House 2024). It is not a book to enjoy as much as a book to learn from, a challenging read.

A poem a day at the kitchen table. We finished Eliabeth Burns’ collection Held (Carcenet 2010) and have moved on to her posthumous collection The Lightkeepers (Wayleave 2016). Elizabeth was the person who first introduced me to a writing group and got me writing poetry seriously. The Wednesday Women Writers met, and still meet, in each other’s houses every week to share and workshop poetry and prose writing. Elizabeth, who died ten years ago, was a friend and mentor for me. Her posthumous collection includes a number of ekphrastic poems about visual art and music.  

We are also reading from Amber, a collection by Iris Ann Lewis, (Graffiti 2024) whom I met and worked with on my recent visit to Ty Newydd. I discovered that I share with her my interest in archaeology and prehistory. 

Both these excellent women poets have  caused us to Google the people and places they reference, which has added another layer of interest to our daily poetry readings.  Because of their carefully researched work we have learned about the Woman of Dolni Vestanice and the Danish painter Hammershoi. (Go on! Google them for yourself!)

Hare in the headlights

Earlier this month I did some voice coaching for members of our Stanza group who were reading at this year’s  Morecambe Poetry Festival. I also read at the Stanza Showcase on the 18^th September at the King St Studio in Lancaster. This latter was a great evening and lovely to hear and enjoy the richness and variety of the work that our group is currently writing.

In October I am hoping to read at the open mic at an event in Kendal organised by Joy Howard, of grey hen books, and where Pauline Yarwood, Ilse Pedler and Kerry Darbyshire will be reading to raise funds for Save the Children’s work in Gaza. (Tuesday 14^th October, 7.00-8.30 pm, Outside-in Children’s Centre, Beezom Road, Kendal, LA9 6EL)  

That’s it for now   

Many years ago when I was teaching performing arts full time, the poet Jackie Kay did a two day residence at Edge Hill University to mark the opening of the Creative Writing department. She also facilitated a workshop with some drama students.

She arrived with a big carrier bag full of the day’s newspapers and invited the students to walk around and look at the headlines. Then she posed the question: What is really going on?  I have never forgotten this session and the extraordinary discussion and wonderful work it engendered in the young people.

For me part of the purpose of poetry is to raise and respond to this question, to engage with public forums and media to write about politics in a creative way. So here are some of the headlines from today’s UK papers: August 30th 2025:

‘Inn justice’ for Epping
Raynor faces sleaze enquiry
Shooting Terror
One third of Gaza wounded are children
Farage deportation plans
Taylor to wed Travis
Migrant hotels face closure
Noel: I’m so proud of Liam
Minister for hypocrisy
Pill for weight loss on NHS

How should or might a poet respond? 

Could  these be headlines prompts?

What preoccupations do they echo in us as poets?

Over the next few months and into 2026  I will be exploring my process in writing political poetry, writing about the really difficult things that make me angry or the ridiculous things that are also terrifying. If you come and read my blog I invite you to respond with your own ideas and comments.

My Writing Life

has been sporadic to say the least during the last 18 months or so, dogged by endless health issues which I will not share, but it has come back on track inspired by my most recent residential at Ty Newydd with Zoe Brigley and Rhian Edwards. Four days in late July: Editing and Submitting your work with Seren editors, and I came away with a plan or should I say A PLAN!!!!.

I have been looking at past poems and the plan is to move my collection, which has been in progress far too long, towards publication. I have come back with lots of ideas  and  much inspiration. My thanks to both lovely tutors and fellow poets who shared the special experience with me. Zoe and Rhian work are both accomplished poets and excellent poetry teachers. Worth following up: https://zoebrigley.com/ and https://www.rhianedwards.co.uk/.

I learnt a lot about editing  and an alternative way of workshopping, as devised by Felicia Rose Chavez: https://www.feliciarosechavez.com/about.

At the moment I am still writing some poems as well as sending poems to magazines and looking for submission windows with  publishers etc. of which more next time…  

My Reading life

A poem a day at the kitchen table. My wife and I started doing this with a couple of Mary Oliver collections that had been languishing on my  bookshelves for a long time. Currently we are enjoying Eliabeth Burns’ collection Held (Carcenet  2010). Sometimes more than one poem. It makes me read poets I haven’t read for a while.

In prose I have enjoyed  Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky. A story of two rivers, the Tigris and the Thames, it tells how a working class, minimally educated young man in 19th century London manages to decode the cuneiform inscribed on clay tablets from ancient Nineveh in the British Museum. However it is also the story of the Yazidi people of Turkey and Iraq, and the oppression they have suffered through the ages, culminating in the genocide committed by ISIS in 2014. At times not a comfortable read (and an ending that is somewhat contrived) but very good quality writing.

Hare in the Headlights

Lots coming up in September apart from  my Stanza group. I am rehearsing some members of the group who are  reading at the Morecambe Poetry Festival (12^th to the 14^th September )Then I am reading at the groups reading  at King Street Studios Lancaster on September 18^th. A  busy month while the plan chunters on in the background.

Till next time and I look forward to receiving your comments soon.

Elizabeth Hare

And getting back is a going to be an expensive nightmare. The countries on the short green list, are largely places too expensive to go to, ever, or that you wouldn’t want to go to, ever.

So, if you could go anywhere where would you go?

Would you, like me, want to go back to somewhere you have already been, somewhere you love? Or somewhere you’ve always wanted to go to and never have.  Thinking about travelling for me has brought on a fit of memories and longing for the roll of the suitcase wheels on the station platform, the sound of other languages around me, the smell and taste of exotic food, the touch of sun on my winter-cold skin.

I have decided on two remedies for this lamentable state of affairs. This month’s poem of the month Papagayo Beach is from my 2019 Wayleave pamphlet, Testimony and you can find it here.

Secondly in the next few days I shall be recording my second U-tube video, If I Could Go Anywhere on which I will be reading a selection of my travel poems.

Please join me on my imagined and remembered travels until we can all go for real.

My Writing Life

The highlight of the last few weeks has been my experience of an Arvon at Home poetry course. I have never been to a real Arvon course, so I was glad to take  the opportunity to go to an online one. It was wonderful to have four workshops, one each morning for four days and two good tutors John Glenday and Mona Arshi, plus tutorials in the afternoons and readings in the evenings. Just like a real writing week!

But not quite. Hours and hours of Zoom made it possible, but were also completely exhausting in the way only screens can be. We were all at home with our lives going on around us and taking a writing retreat was not easy. Having said that I really enjoyed the screen company of the other poets, even if socialising was minimal.

It was certainly worthwhile and online makes Arvon accessible to people in other countries who would otherwise never have been able to come.

I am longing to get back to real writing residentials and I shan’t mind if I never zoom again after restrictions are lifted in June, but it was fun and very interesting and worthwhile.

My Reading life

Very largely influenced by the poetry that we read at the Arvon. There was a recommendation to read collections, so I have just finished a second reading of Elizabeth Burns posthumous collection Light Keepers. Because Elizabeth lived here and was in my writing group and was a mentor and friend,  it was both a sad and a joyful experience. In this reading I revisited many poems I have loved and heard her read and encountered more I had never come across.

In my determination to read poetry I have also been reading the latest in the series of BloodAxe anthologies Staying Human (ed: N. Astley 2020). It is vast tome and I have taken it slowly and methodically. However, I confess to not having read every poem and some sections were, inevitably, more to my taste than others. I particularly enjoyed the poems in the section entitled Harmony and Discord.

Hare in the Headlights

My publication this month in the Grey hen anthology Not Past, But Through (ed J. Howard, 2021) of my poem about my hometown river Lune.

After a break, apart from Arvon, of nearly two months from writing I am returning slowly and getting going again. Always on the horizon is my dream of a collection.

That’s all for now.

 

 

You must be the change you want to see in the world. Mahatma Gandhi

It has been just over a month since the end of the Kendal Poetry Festival. During that time how does a poet react to what is happening out there and all around her?

My Writing life

Poetry is one of the few art forms that can be said to have survived the pandemic reasonably well. Poetry is written and often read alone, and the internet lends itself well to the sharing of workshops, readings and even festivals online. It has been a lifesaver for me to have my regular writing groups on Zoom throughout the last year.

Having said that, the Kendal Poetry Festival was tour de force and included 60 poets and up to 160 participants at some of the readings. All credit is due to the directors for getting such a complex event together so well. It was great to return to reading after reading and see the same faces there. Some of the time it felt as though we really were together sharing the experience. Of course, we missed the live buzz and getting our books signed, but there was the advantage of hearing poets who were reading in other countries and who might not have been able to come in person.  Afterwards I rushed to the festival online bookshop and bought books which I am now taking my time to enjoy. For nine days the festival banished the lockdown blues.

But there was more to it than that. Much was read about the reality we are currently struggling to survive in, about climate change, about politics and the pandemic. It would be easy to dismiss the event as too small to make a difference, but I heard poets who were very clearly being the change they want to see and touching the hearts and minds of those who listen to and read their work.

In the first week of March all daily life, and the writing life, was interrupted by the murder of Sarah Everard, allegedly by a serving police officer, and by the way the demonstrations of grief and solidarity and the protests against violence against women have been addressed by the police and by the media.

I know no woman who can truthfully say that they have never been harassed or treated with disrespect because they are female. So how can we expect to live the change except by protesting, except by meeting without fear, except by walking our streets at night, and that is still hard to do.

My writing life continues reasonably steadily at about a poem a week at present pushed on by the deadline of the next online writing group. I am happily being guided at present by Kate Clanchy’s Grow Your Poem. I recommend it.  Right now, I am taking a break from the group and have signed up for an Arvon at Home at the end of April.

My reading life has been rich and strange this month. I have enjoyed Anne Tyler’s The Redhead at the Side of the Road, only wished it had been longer. Also Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen, and The Other People by C J Tudor. All good reads, getting me through this seemingly endless lockdown.  And yesterday I finished reading Carolyn Forche’s collection In The Lateness of the World and very soon I am going to read it again. I have now plunged into a truly enormous anthology, more of that next time.

Hare in the Headlights

This month I have had a poem, Lune accepted for a forthcoming Grey Hen anthology and sold 35 copies of my pamphlet Just Above the Waterline. 

I am currently about to make my second YouTube recording of poetry, coming up soon.

That’s all for now.

The title is in the spirit of the recent landing of Perseverance on Mars, and also because the first part of this blog is about the launch of my latest Wayleave pamphlet Just Above the Water Line on 29^th January 2021 online.

I sat on the sofa in my living room and read my poetry to 50 people. It felt very strange. There are many reasons why I would have liked to have had a real launch with refreshments and wine and friends gathered, but it was nevertheless, a lovely occasion. It felt very odd at the end when I just switched everyone off rather than staying on for a chat and a drink.

Anyway, thanks to Mike Barlow for publishing me (again), to Graham Lowe for his beautiful cover illustration and to my partner Pat for inspiration, punctuation and patience with my, mercifully temporary, persona of ‘temperamental artist’.

Thanks also to my guest readers Carole Coates who read from her forthcoming collection and Pauline Yarwood who read from her Wayleave pamphlet and other poems.

Here are details of what they read.

Pauline read:

Open Skies and Depth of Field, both of which will be in her new pamphlet, Loop which will be published by Wayleave in April.

Things change (published earlier this year in The Unpredicted Spring – Lockdown Poetry 2020, edited by Kathleen Jones and published by The Book Mill Press as part of the Norman Nicholson Poetry Competition.)

and a new poem, Sweet Sixteen. 

Carole read:

Falling in Love with the AA Man (and how he taught me to love my car)
History to the Defeated may say Alas
All Greece Hates
Coming Back Unexpectedly You Look through the Window at your own Room.
All these poems will appear in her next collection When the Swimming Pool
Fell in the Sea, to be published in May this year by Shoestring Press.

Finally, thanks to everyone who came and the lovely feedback I have had from so many of you. 

Back to my usual blog format

My Writing life

Been busy for the last month. I have been more or less keeping up my daily pages, not every day but at least every few days, and I am not going to beat myself up about it! I have written six poems since the beginning of 2021 and am keeping up with both my writing group and Brewery Poets online. I have just submitted four poems to a magazine and am starting to write and collect for my (one day, hoped for) collection! One thing about lockdown: you can’t say you are never at home to write …

Currently attending the Kendal Poetry Festival online as well, all nine days of it. I will do a retrospective blog about it next month.

My Reading life

Some wonderful books recently, and reading is definitely a major part of coping with the present circumstances.

I have enjoyed.

Redhead at the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

We Begin at the End by Chris Whittaker

And am currently reading Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing.

One of the few upsides of lockdown is plenty of time to read as well as write.

Hare in the Headlights

Coming up, I plan two U tube recordings soon.

The first will include a couple of poems from the pamphlet but will mostly be travel poems and called If I could go anywhere, simply because at present we can’t go anywhere. The second is still at then thinking stage.

Then there is the magazine submission and a poem submitted to a forthcoming anthology that I have not heard about yet.

So, several things cooking just now.

Till soon

If you would like to buy a copy of my pamphlet, please go to the publications page and scroll down to the order form. The pamphlet costs £5 and there is no additional charge for postage.