I realised looking back over the blogs for this year so far they have veered from being miserabilist to being rant-y. not surprising really in view of what has been happening in the world, politics, climate crisis etc. However this one is going to be my first, and I hope not my only, cheerful blog of 2026. So here is a list of some of the things that have cheered me up no end.

First of all and top of the list our Andy is back in parliament and likely to be Prime Minister before too long. Two of our friends were in Makefield canvassing for him and we have been celebrating. It is the turn of the Right, political and media,  to be miserabilist and complain. Maybe there is a chance now for change to happen rather than just be talked about.

Secondly I have discovered, thanks to a member of one of my WhatsApp poetry groups, the wonderful funny poetry of Brian Bilston that has had me chuckling for days. Even better, it seems he is coming to read at the Morecambe poetry festival in September

Also in the recent heat and following rain, my vegetables are growing at last.

My writing life 

I have now received my manuscript for my first collection back from the professional editor who has been looking at it for me. Over the next month or so most of my writing life will be taken up with responding to the edit and entering a couple of competitions. 

My reading life

Apart from Brian Bilston I have enjoyed Sarah Howe’s latest collection Foretokens (Chatto and Windus, 2025) and I am reading Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ book Kindred about the Neanderthals (don’t ask!).

Hare in the Headlights 

Nothing to report

Poem of the month appropriately is Beneath the Surface.First published in my Wayleave pamphlet Testimony, it feels appropriate as we are experiencing the effects of climate change so dramatically with unprecedented heat waves followed by torrential rain and unseasonal high winds.

A couple of weeks ago journalist Annunziata Rees-Mogg (sister of Jacob, if you were wondering) put a post on X saying “Asylum seekers make up 0.8% of Dorset’s population and 44% of alleged sex offenses.” Radio 4’s programme More or Less (20^th May 2026) proved the claim was false, using data provided by Bournemouth police, who said they had no idea where the figure of 44% had come from. (The true figure, according to police, is about 1%.) Some X users tried to verify Rees-Mogg’s claim using Meta’s AI Grok, which assured them that it was correct. So even those people showing some scepticism before believing a big fat social media lie were then given false information by an AI.

This story leaves me with  a paradox because, I believe, like Maggie O Farrell (Guardian 31^st May 2026), that uncertainty is the very essence of creativity and also that poets have a responsibility to the truth. Here is how my thinking on this dilemma goes.

Obviously the discussion about truth is centuries old and has become crucial in our contemporary world where the tools made available by the internet and AI are used to deliberately to spread misinformation, lies and false rumours to make money.

In contrast, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical  last week: Magnifica Humanitas

(Magnificent Humanity), discussed and quoted in the Guardian by Francine Rose on 28^th May. In her article she talks about the way the Pope refers to AI and its misuse and about Humanity and its uniqueness. Prose quotes the Pope as follows:

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/29/pope-ai-encyclical)

As a poet I find that, believing I have a responsibility to the truth, the list of human qualities that Pope Leo identifies becomes a list of subjects that are bedrock of poetry; the body, joy and pain, love and friendship. Using these topics poets look for ways to express what it means to be human, and, to borrow Pope Leo’s words, to be magnificent.

This month, with the death of a dear friend, I have been confronted as a poet and a human being by the ultimate truth of our mortality. It has been a month of gardening, of the coming of spring and the passing of someone who lived 92 years of a good life as a musician and teacher. My poem for my Stanza group this month is in her memory and an attempt to capture the human truth of grief.

My reading life

I have almost finished reading Karen Lloyd’s Earthworks (Saraband 2025) her collection of environmental and ecological essays. I met Karen years ago as we were both members of  Brewery Poets in Kendal, and her writing rings with her poetic sensibilities. Her essays are fascinating and beautiful, telling us the truth of the environment and climate as she researches alongside scientists and activists.

I subscribe to Katrina Naomi’s newsletter Short and Sweet and was greatly comforted to read that it can take her months to read a poetry collection. She suggests, quite correctly, it should be read taking time and attention. I have just embarked on Sarah Howe’s Foretokens (Chatto and Windus 2025) I am going to read it and take as long as it takes!

My writing life 

has largely given way to gardening this month and been overtaken by life. Now it is raining I return to my desk with renewed energy. It sounds a bit of a cliché but actually an activity like gardening is a way of resting the mind and thoughts and ideas for new poems come floating up. I am about to submit some poems to another magazine building on some success in the last few months. I shall return to Kate Clanchy’s How to Grow your own Poem. She is a hard taskmistress.

Hare in the headlights

Two poems accepted by Dreamcatcher Magazine, due out later this summer!

Poem of the month is Bamburgh Beach first published in my pamphlet Testimony (Wayleave Press 2019) and the only Villanelle I have ever had published!

Till next time…

I need to say at once I don’t have the answer and everyone has their own way of coping with what’s going on. Over the last few days the lovely weather (yes I know it is too hot for this time of year because of climate change, but…) has taken me in the direction of some the answers that I can give myself.

The best remedy for me is the undoubtedly the garden, the allotment and the satisfaction that today the potatoes got planted, the carrots, strawberries and seeds watered in glorious sunshine. It feels like a huge privilege to have the land and capacity to grow some of our food, for now at least.

Yesterday was a day full of small positive moments and events. I was at the local community centre to meet a friend for coffee and there were two  women at the next table talking, one of whim was clearly from the United States. Later that day I ran into her again; she recognised me and we spoke for a few moments. It was interesting to hear her version of what is going on in the United States and share her horror and also her persistent hope. I will probably never see her again as she was only here for a few days, so thanks Nancy from Albuquerque New Mexico and all the best. Stay safe; your country needs people like you.

Also yesterday evening while I was waiting for my choir to start I met the asylum seekers and refugees from the LGBTQ+ group formed by the charity I used to run. Great to see these people who have been so afraid and been through so much horror so  relaxed and simply accepted as part of the local community meeting in the centre we all share. 

Of course more that anything else my consolation comes from the poetry that I read, write and talk about. A recent trip to Ireland gave me the chance to catch up a with a poet friend and regular follower of my blog. We read and exchanged our poems and talked about poets we love and admire.

I thought I had finished writing this blog but then yesterday (30^th April) I got stuck in a traffic jam and listened to Radio 4’s Feedback. They were interviewing Fergal Keane the foreign correspondent and he talked about how he and many of this colleagues reporting from war zones keep a book of poems at hand to help them relax away from the stresses and strains of reporting conflict. He quoted John O’Donoghue  and read his poem This is the Time to be Slow, a beautiful poem. You can hear the interview and Fergal reading the poem on BBC Sounds. Below is a link to the text. Relax and enjoy.. 

https://www.thethinkingproject.co.uk/poemsofathinkingenvironment/timetogoslow

My reading life

Holiday reading mostly and halfway through the Karen Lloyd book I mentioned last time. The pile of unread poetry at my side remains a pile of unread poetry and I refuse to feel guilty about it. One of these days I will make a start and no doubt the result will be inspiration.

My writing life

My collection went off for its professional edit  earlier this month I have had 2 poems accepted for Dreamcatcher magazine’s forthcoming number, which I am very pleased about. I have also managed to write a couple of poems recently, but you can’t rush these things…

Poem of the month is appropriately Heat (21degrees today!) first published in my pamphlet Testimony (Wayleave 2019).

Until next time…

It really isn’t. Jim Ratcliffe, who is a billionaire and owns  part of Manchester United, remarked some weeks ago that our country has been colonised by immigrants. He intended it as a negative remark, joining in the antiimmigrant rhetoric of the far Right. Oddly enough, he was right. Our country and most of the countries of the world have been colonised by immigrants over millennia since humans first left Africa. Most of us are  immigrants or descended from immigrants.

I decided for this blog that it was time for a rant about this, as I am more than furious about the new proposal from our current government to restrict indefinite leave to remain for refugees who are already settled here and asylum seekers who are hoping for refugee status. This new law makes it much more difficult for them to integrate into the community, as their leave will be reviewed every 30 months and they may have to wait up to 20 years for settled status.

Asylum seekers first arrived here in  Lancaster in 2016 as our city became a City of Sanctuary and in 2017 a group of us set up a charity to support them. I am pleased to say that RAIS Lancaster continues to  flourish and provide much needed services for the growing community.  

Over the eight years that I worked with RAIS, the vast majority  of people I met from all over the world had good cause to be here. They were fleeing war and persecution. When they got leave to remain their spouses and dependant children could join them as they settled down.  They studied at our colleges and universities, worked, paid taxes and became part of the richness of our diverse country. They should not be punished for doing the right thing, following the rules and jumping through numbers of hoops to get to where they can feel safe.

We all know that without migrant workers the NHS, most of public transport and the care system would probably collapse. Last year refugees and migrant workers contributed over 21bn to the economy in taxes. Mr Ratcliffe took his money to Monaco to avoid paying tax.

So immigration is an asset, not a problem. Immigrants enrich our society and our lives. Without them we would be poorer. and demonising them diminishes us.

Over the years of working  with asylum seekers and refugees I wrote a number of poems about the people I met and got to know. This month’s poem of the month Reporting to the Home Office was published in my pamphlet Just Above the Waterline (Wayleave 2021). The poem is a retelling of a true story, about when  one of the volunteers for the charity took an asylum seeker to sign on, as they had to do regularly, with Border Force officers, at a police station. They were always terrified of being arrested and detained, which could happen at any time.

My reading life

Is very slow at the moment. Books everywhere not getting finished and some not even read.  Writing this makes me think of me school reports ‘could do better’. I promise I will have more to say next month, although the garden has just started needing my attention…   

My writing life

No headlights to dazzle me this month..

The weekend of 21^st-23^rd March saw the Lancaster LitFest spring weekend. I attended the poetry day and heard,  among others, readings by Sarah Howe and Blake Morrison. On the Saturday morning I attended a workshop led by Karen Lloyd on writing about environmental breakdown. Karen’s latest book of lyrical essays/memoir is entitled Earthworks (Saraband 2026). I found the workshop provided a lot of ideas and inspiration for writing about these issues  and I enjoyed Karen’s excellent teaching.

That’s it for now.

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