Featuring the poet Jill Sharp & artist Tim Carroll
Issue 2 – November 2011 – Poetry & Art – ISSN 2048-0709
Issue No.2 – November 2011
Publisher IMPpress, Downstream, 55 Broadtown, Wiltshire, England, SN4 7RG website Editor Guest Poet-editor Proofing Guest Artist R&D + Design Delivery Printer
www.IMPpress.co.uk John Richardson Jill Sharp Friends Tim Carroll the editor Issuu Magcloud
Acknowledgements The Editor gratefully acknowledges the help, support and encouragement of his BlueGate Poet friends and to the editor of the now defunct Ouroborus review which proved an inspiration for this e-zine.
Donations Your gifts of ones, tens or hundreds, in whatever currency, would be wonderful!
Subscriptions There are no paid subscriptions to the IMPress, it is a free online e-zine available from the website. You are also able to download the free a digital distribution copy for off-line reading. If you require a printed copy this may be obtained for a small fee via our printers, direct from their website.
Pamphlets & books We also publish poetry pamphlets and books. Visit our website for further information.
Contributions Your poems and art are always welcome, via email, please see our website for submission details.
Cover art Flood
and featured artwork all courtesy of Tim Carroll
Copyright Š reserved to the editor, the contributing poets and artists.
Editorial Welcome to the second edition of the IMPpress. In this edition we are pleased to feature the work of •
Jill Sharp, a BlueGate poet from Swindon and
•
Tim Carroll, the Swindon figurative artist, (go visit his website at http://www.timcarroll.yolasite.com for more of his art).
In the ekphrasis section of the e-zine some of Jay Arr’s poems have been paired with Tim’s paintings. I’d encourage you to the download digital version of the issue and would very much appreciate your feedback via the comments page on our website. Enjoy! John Richardson Editor
the IMPpress FYI: this issue could, and would not have been completed without the wonderful background music of Let Them Talk by Hugh Laurie . If you haven’t heard it and enjoy New Orleans Blues, I urge you to go and buy the CD and/or DVD; if only to stop you fuming at MS-WORD’s *@!$%^# mendacious proclivities.
Contents Poets
Artists
Elinor Brooks
Page Poems & Artwork 1 2
Teresa Davey
3 Cormac Davey
Claire Dyer
4 Alex Nodopaka
Raúl Gallardo
5 Stephen Morris
Rebecca Gethin
6 British Museum drawing
Stephen P. Holton Rosie Jackson
7
Act of Charity
8
Picasso at the Café de Flore Sacred Helpless watchers Fantasy seascape #2 Undiscovered photos Obvious … Praise Mother and Ember Hybrids Old Love In a World of Metamorphosis
Claudia Krizay David King
9 Alex Nodopaka 10
Andrew McCallum
11 Kistina Zimbakova
David R. Morgan
12 Francina SmallsJoyner
Mo Needham
13 Kirstina Zimkakova
Wullie Purcell
14
Ankita Saxena
15 Tim Carroll
Jill Sharp
16 17 18 19 Tim Carroll
Fiona Sinclair
20 Claudia Krizay
Murali Sivaramkrishnan
21 Cormac Davey
Lanyon Quoit Photograph Men An Tol Photograph Skywatching Sunset in the Black Mountains, Wales Untitled, Glamis Castle Fantasy seascape #1 Ralph Lauren Homage to Amedeo Modigliani As the voice of the marsh drying out in a rainless April Snipe Drumming Snipe
Palaeontology Love in the Cornfield Newark Castle Photograph Midnight The Winter’s Tale Diver Proserpina opens his fridge The Dogs of Delhi Think only this First Bite Voyage The Schreckenstein Ferry Found Paranoia Night in Reno Dawn Wave Cloud over Newcastle, Co. Down, Northern Ireland Yoga
continued
Poets
Artists Page Poems & Artwork
Jason Sturner
22
Stopwatch
Ray Succre
23
Mike Watts
24
The Harpy and the Mongoose County Jail, Genus Tulipa Scorching
Featured Artist
Tim Carroll
26
Ekphrasis Jay Arr
26 Tim Carroll
Jay Arr
27 Tim Carroll
Jay Arr
28 Tim Carroll
Jay Arr
29 Tim Carroll
Jay Arr
30 Tim Carroll
Jay Arr
31 Tim Carroll
Brief Biographies
32 34
Not here Drawing - Lizard Boxes Pickers and Packers Until that moment Elvis Head On the right hand of Seven deadly sins - Pride Prague Travellers in Italy Strange Towards Faringdon
Elinor Brooks
Lanyon Quoit Under the granite capstone horses plash in mud, dredge puddled water. Blown here by hurricane rumours, by winds, they kiss each other's necks nibble, nudge, bare teeth passing each other's shoulders: eyes roll, ears prick. The wind has tattered their manes. In the sour, spiked grass hard platforms of cobbled dung. They have sheltered here for centuries since long before the storm that brought the dolmen to its knees and broke one leg. Its roof is lower now, the horses backs are bare. Once there were riders; once they were ridden there.
Photograph – Elinor Brooks
1
Elinor Brooks
Men An Tol stone with a hole
High among heather tracks peter out like unfinished lines: 'It's not far now...' 'It isn't much...' It's...It's...tseeping from the jagged thorns, scraps of birdsong caught on brambles. Sunshine sweeps the grass a startling green and shadows pass. The Devil's Eye is open: a naked child crawls through on windswept knees. Her back is curved and reddening in the noon-day ultra-violet rays, her chest is caved. The mother clasps her green-stick wrists, draws her along the ground. It hurts. Two brass pins on the stone are crossed. They glint. Will she be cured? the mother asks Will she... but still the pins don't move. Herring gulls are crying over Madron.
2 Photograph – Elinor Brooks
Teresa Davey
Skywatching A meteor display they said so I lie on a plastic tablecloth underneath a covering of earth brown wool enveloped by the pristine dark. As lights fall silently across the sky heralded only by the silent print of an astronomer’s prediction I pull the blanket tighter. There’s something unnerving about cosmology; quantum physics, black holes, countless galaxies, aeons of time and tipping points. Later reading ‘Dharma Bums’ Jack Kerouac spoke to me. ‘Big steamy clouds’ he wrote ‘going by in the dark up there, it makes me realise we live on an actual planet.’ The universe is a giant suduko requiring more than a five star brain to unravel its secrets which I’m sure you will agree is infinitely and almost definitely, undoable. If one day in time to come another Galileon incarnation should sigh contentedly put their pencil down the last dot in its place, will humanity still be on its back looking at the beauty of the night, or eyes closed, be heading for oblivion, on their long plunge out of sight?
Sunset in the Black Mountains, Wales – Cormac Davey
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Claire Dyer
Untitled, Glamis Castle Say we shall come again to Glamis, stop amid this gentle press of hills as a wire-thin wind crochets the air and sombre pheasants tchee in the valley below. Say we shall stand by these gates, lean against wrought metal slightly cold and take each other’s photograph to amber-set our breaths, cry fie to time. Say we shall be found here, immutable, permanent as outcrop, as battlement, watched by pierce-eyed buzzards as they skim a boundless rim of sky.
4 Fantasy seascape #1 – Alex Nodopaka
Raúl Gallardo
Ralph Lauren Nobody cares if your face inspired the mold for the Ralph Lauren mannequin You don’t understand why it makes you ordinary and in no way special One day you won’t be able to notice the difference amongst all those replicas Forcing yourself to look inside for something else besides plastic or wood Now any man can have you
Homage to Amedeo Modigliani – Stephen Morris
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Rebecca Gethin
As the voice of the marsh drying out in a rainless April The stars in bud, bird song dwindling into the darker reaches, water shining in what’s left of light. Seeing my movement, a doe barks, a glimmer of her tail, the sky indigo, the last cuckoo calls a blackbird flutes up, falters, constellations open one by one. As if from the ground – a moan, a long-drawn call of desolation, as a snipe zips like a wisp through the dark, whisking through such largeness. She responds chupa-chupa from the furthest reach so fragile these calls between day and night
Snipe Drumming We sit on a mat of bracken at nightfall and listen together. In whispers we try to agree on the words that begin to describe the sound of his tail feathers – not drumming, a breath being drawn across a hollow reed, like a goat bleating, or perhaps a thrum. We strain our eyes in the dark to see the dive. A gust of wind can mask it – but there it goes: the voice of the marsh humming to itself, thinking aloud.
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Snipe – British Museum drawing
Stephen P. Holton
Act of Charity A furnace in summer, a fridge in winter: the doorway where he stands alone with guitar takes the best and worst nature can throw. Whatever the weather, he braves it to play, earning the only way he knows how. As he thrashes out old chords, sings to the street, the punters drop coins affectionately at his feet, and on this day even my own close grip slackens on a pound; because his song choice (albeit briefly) handed my lost teens back to me.
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Rosie Jackson
Picasso at the Café de Flore He is a master contortionist he knows how to slide eyes half way down a cheek split faces in two. But still it startles him when the reflection in the café window, his own - the short but robust male women fall for – hesitates, then remains standing when he sits down, watching him like a stubborn lover who refuses to be dismissed. He turns his back soaks up the sunlight from the Boulevard St Germain tries not to glance round and see the self in the glass still hanging there like a detached retina. Even when he saunters away he remains confused, drunk beyond anything he’s consumed, confounded which of them is real and which the absence. And for a while that day, he too - the great master of division is caught in the same space his models occupy between canvas and sky.
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Sacred – Claudia Krizay
David King
Helpless watchers ! The muscling sea, huge in a landscape of its own making, rearranging hills, stacking fresh mountains, swelling brimmed slopes of fleeting valleys, the very weight of it, uncertainty made solid and moving, throwing the eyes and stomachs of helpless watchers, unglad tidings, salted with brief lace clipped horizons, slipping, slipping, off the edge of the world, only monsters here, where the sea falls, mad roaring to our own black fears, slapped wet with the heaviness of knowing we too shall one day dissolve into earth, into stream, into sea.
Fantasy seascape #2 – Alex Nodopaka
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David King
Undiscovered photos ! Deft gales take and leave blossom as if orchards were rooms best left unswept, the kind where each mote of dust remembers how to float in pillars of light leant against closed windows, where undiscovered photos of dead people lie undiscovered, here dark abandoned wardrobes stand, never franticked open in a game of hide and seek starring a close-skin-smelling girl with plaits and no front teeth. This is how God likes it, a mess of beauty unsettled by each moment and each moment, to match this breath, this heartbeat and the next and the next.
Obvious‌ ! ‌to say water skins us as we step from the sea and in the lush green everything of an oak lined spinney, pure air does the same, a coating so precise its swaddling makes of us a mould into which our tiny days are poured, each one identically different, each filled with our noise, our silences.
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On we tread to leave, not footprints but evaporations, of our very selves.
Andrew McCallum
Praise for Trish
say a quiet word to the cat when you wake in the dark house before the light grows loud say good morning to the fears that skulk by your bed say hello before they dash beneath the shadows say good evening to the flies darting into the jam jar say a word to them to the geese working toward a place of greater warmth say goodbye without hesitation
Mother and Ember – Kristina Zimbakova
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David R. Morgan
Hybrids
(Christmas 2010)!
!
There is mulled wine in the slow cooker, and the long evening drinks it. There are words we wait for, as Adam for Eve before language was made… like the love of hybrids, certitude’s question mark; yellow fields of flowers blue with butterflies, not yet a memory but a cross breeding of beginnings. So it seemed we were all here and locked in for the evening. We played pretending we were safe, pretending we were young. But you never really arrived, and it was not you who returned. So that I taught myself the things I thought I'd need: I learned how to keep time. Though there was no one in the crowded room. I made an alliterative alphabet; showed everyone painkillers and prayer books. ! And whenever you were telephoned you were startled by the familiar voice; as if there was time to change things, as though you were still alive. ! There is mulled wine in the glass, and the long evening drinks it; here are words we waited for, and they changed us like our lives… but the night needs only night o that, being what we are with our love of hybrids , yellow and blue, we turned back once again to our beginnings.
Old Love Less fiercely than river carves banks, more subtly than glacier hollows lake… you fit my body to yours even now, turning slowly in sleep; weathered stone to breathing soil.
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In a World of Metamorphosis – Francina Smalls-Joyner
Mo Needham
Palaeontology Floriferous Shadows of the past, Etched in the hardness of cold, grey rocks. Sea creatures on mountain tops. Flying things beneath the earth. Tropical forests in dry, naked desert sands, And mammoths sleeping in frozen bogs. Thin apparitions, the echoed ghosts of the dead. Echoed in the soundness of stone. Hammer and chiseled From their long-set moulds. Regnum, phylum, classis, ordo, familia, genus, species, subspecies. They sit, White labelled, in glass cabinets, Exposed and hardened, By time. Insinuating histories, With their etched, dark, shiny shells They wait, Without time, For their rumour to erode. Patient palaeontology.
Love in the Cornfield – Kristina Zimbakova
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Wullie Purcell
Newark castle Crumbling walls. Collapsed and gapped Give home to birds Their calls the only music left Where once kings came To feast and favour Play and plot
14 !!Photograph – Wullie Purcell
Ankita Saxena
Midnight the second which doesn’t belong. she forgets you like Sunday afternoons and you dance along with your monosyllabic song. you whisper and it’s over. you sigh and it’s just begun. you steal her carelesslya slither of her memory still implanted in the seconds when you didn’t belong.
The Winter’s Tale – Tim Carroll
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Jill Sharp - featured poet
Diver Straddling the watertop he is inanimate peach crescents on limpid jelly but bodied to perspex eye and rubber proboscis hands devolve to fins legs emerge tail in that element. He, inside the white squid of his body, the slow bellows of his breath, seems the sea’s new monster till mouthed by a mass-moving million fish. Straight-faced, indifferent, diffident, the underwater fizzes, makes shadows their own objects, draws its horizons like purse-strings, falls headlong into chasms. Grim fish meet him face to face; he is fingered by tactile weed and the depths jowl his limbs. Timely, then, his break into thin air. Salt water rolls from his back in centuries. His toes grip the sand.
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Jill Sharp
Proserpina opens his fridge Her soft tug releases an odour. The light flicks on... Along the top rack lies a tube of puree, twisted, missing its lid. A streaky rasher dangles between the rails. What was once lettuce drips onto a ripped-open empty package and a bruised wedge of cheese. Stuck in the bars, dried halves of onion, rings shrunk apart, lose their skins over a closed container holding nothing but sprouting spuds and an egg-box, its sole sticky occupant cracked... She’s already eaten his meal, but now pulls free the Eiffel Tower souvenir magnet and leaves beneath it a brief note in lipstick on a white unfolded serviette.
The dogs of Delhi are not like the dogs back home. Replete, tucked up like turbans, they snooze on the streets, rolling over to sun their ghoolies, soft-pouched gulab jamuns, tendered knowing no-one will proffer a foot. They repay a westerner’s whistle with feline indifference, roam alone, trotting with ease along roadsides, pausing to sniff the air. At dusk, in quiet groups, they watch the sweating rickshaw-wallahs, old men cross-legged in their dim havelis, red-arsed monkeys on parapets and the circling shadows of pariah kites who eye them patiently, these slow-baked Mughal feasts destiny will unwrap – chapatti, bhuna, dhal.
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Jill Sharp
Think only this Halted on a hillside under trees facing the Cotswold ridge they stand at ease, silent in their ceremonial dress displaying rank, initials, surname, regimental crest, ribboned reminders of the greater good in latin mottoes they'd have understood, one date - a number, month and year announcing, white on white, each man's arrival here. But as their home town's evening lights spread further, unfamiliar, from these heights and ancient trees widen their net of shadows, the roll-call lengthens with new names, sharp-etched, and every year they wear a paper poppy and red kites circle in the quiet valley.
(Eighty men who fell in WW1 lie in Kingshill cemetery, Swindon)
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Jill Sharp
Voyage
First Bite
I lie on the narrow bed, you in my arms. This is our last night, love, but you are tired. My mind drifts to another time, your eyes sea-blue above the old steel-string guitar we used to sing to; then to your hands’ first rippling touch, my ‘wild surmise’! How we lay coiled upon a single bed or cavorted across its sturdy frame like sailors running the spinnaker. Now we rest, becalmed in the slow swell of your heaving chest. Beneath the instruments that chart your path, we sleep. I dream of you holding me in our little craft, and wake when your arm falls from me, knowing you’ve gone.
When he chewed that Newton Wonder pips and all, and flicked the stalk like a butt-end into the gutter, I recalled how my mother winced at the flesh of apple, how I’d learned to take it to my lips peeled first, then sliced. This fruit, he said, revealed the forces shaping our universe. So I took mine in both hands. Yet when pink stained the white I couldn’t help, as sweetness seared my tongue, but wonder if it was me that bite had wounded, or the apple.
The Schreckenstein Ferry – Tim Carroll
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Fiona Sinclair
Found Two pitches down people pick over a life. Amongst crockery , a wooden box on cork screw legs, I stroke its mahogany flanks. Inside baby blue lining is glimpsed through a ramshackle nest of sewing materials. My trespassing hands are pricked by booby trapped pins, churned contents release charity shop smell, nevertheless £15 and it’s in the back of my car. Back home, I turn with curator care the pages of her log Knitting needles set 4, brown 978 ciphers baffling as a spy’s field book. Goose bumps as her tiny sleeping beauty thimble is slipped onto the tip of my little finger. Bottom of the box, her hoard of Woman’s Realm patterns and embroidery cloths. One bearing a few links of colour and a needle lanced, when she was called away. Following Sunday, the materials are a lucky dip. A brake is applied on a buggy ‘Stop pestering and let me look’ The woman speed reads the contents ‘How much for the lot?’ She carries the container off on her infant’s lap , planning snatched trysts with her needlework when the kids are asleep. In my bedroom paper, pens and thesaurus begin to make themselves at home in Mrs. Taylor’s sewing box
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Paranoia – Claudia Krizay
Murali Sivaramkrishnan
Night in Reno who has pulled all the stars down and drained the rainbow of all its colors? Might be the playful children of the Reno valley. The night is still young in the Casino.
Dawn stretching and pulling the dawn is a cat now a mat strongly pulled away—dawn
Yoga the meeting of simple silent self and howling Brahman— peace that passes all understanding
Wave Cloud over Newcastle, Co Down, N.I. – Cormac Davey
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Jason Sturner
Stopwatch Everyone is dead. Slumped against steering wheels, on the floors of kitchens and bedrooms, face down in swimming pools. Bodies litter the malls, the halls of prestigious universities, they're in hospitals and sports bars, at desks in corporate offices. In the centre of the oval office lays the body of our president, maggots crawl out from beneath her eyelids. The rats beneath the streets lift their heads and twitch their noses. Vultures fly off trees into waves of decay. Remnants of humanity crumble, are buried, eroded and grown over. We are dust and fossils; we are history. The planet is lush and productive. Out in an unnamed ocean a new breed of dolphin is born, its flippers more like modified claws. One day, it will use them to grasp the shoreline.
(First published in Down in the Dirt Magazine, June 2009)
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Ray Succre
The Harpy and the Mongoose I have walked my bike to the bicycle woman, her clever gut spilling up grips and spokes, my large feet dragging as her grey-moon head appears. To talk of nothing, the edge of a talk, two wheels, one wheel, then two again, all the day toward a place I'll never find, is a rebellious sputter of chain, sprocket, tarsals, cash. The bicycle woman eats from my hands, and then sits atop my feet, asking me to walk slow. I lug her to the money, to the show, all the way to civility. Several coins on several large papers flash into her mouth and are gone. She re-shuffles destruction, repairs everything, even me. Now, the speed builds and the steel feels; I strike a ramp, will come back down, always down, but if I didn't...
County Jail, Genus Tulipa The linger of his cop cologne, acrid strong, stayed in my pockets, the dents of my wrists, and the crosshatch of patroller backseat wire left me with vision as through diamonds. There were tulips in rows around the jail. They had tacked up my record like gypsum. Coded in bars and numerals like groceries, I was ushered in past virile tulip redolence, into a plentiful absence of usual sociology. The isolation of a cola reduces its fizz, and the narrowness of concretion was a life of sheeted steel and innocuous paint. You’re to think of the entry, the tulips, and error. You’re to think of the fizz in your blood. The breakfast came, the lunch came, and the cell door never opened, but insisted. Introduce me to the gardener for a county jail, and I should kick the blooms off his flowertops, if only for their menace.
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Mike Watts
Scorching Cool - in my shorts and £5.00 shades, I pedal to buy beer for my fridge. It’s late June: the sun is fuming, And I am thrilled to burn beneath it. To my left and to my right the beautiful Distract me: Summer is not a season for single men. Outside the shop, A tethered dog licks lazily at its balls. I have no lock. I chance it, Lean it up against a window, where headlines Claim we are baking better than Florida. Inside, a girl with tattoos and bejewelled navel Takes my twenty. I hang a bag of six over my handlebars And head back home. The sky is a stretch of merciless blue, And I think of these lagers and of breasts And legs. In two days July begins. No respite.
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Tim Carroll - featured artist Tim says: “English literature and early Italian Renaissance art have been a rich source of inspiration for me. In my work I hope to produce a multi-layered image which resonates at different levels. I am interested in the formal design of a painting or sculpture as well as its narrative content. I'm looking for a work that activates the imagination. A picture works for me when it has an air of mystery as well as being decorative and formally satisfying”
Not here Lying on the sand noticing a lizard by my hand, having carefully planned this weekend away, I still can’t quite believe that you’re not here. You’d re-arranged your shifts, we’re fine you said, don’t worry, as I lay on the sand, the lizard by my hand. The drugs will be working now. It felt queer, knowing you’d never be here again to say, don’t worry. I just can’t believe you’re not here on this weekend away, having carefully planned it. I called, (knowing you were in her bed, as I feared unfaithful again and I’d taught you to play away!) to re-arrange your shifts and you managed. It feels queer, the drugs are working, you are not here. I can’t believe it and the lizard, by my hand, on the sand.
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Drawing - Lizard
Ekphrasis 1 – Jay Arr
Boxes They ask if we've got the boxes with the boxes they're much more valuable of course we don't have the boxes the boxes are long gone with memories of Christmases birthdays candle blowing cakes wrapping paper in the loft there's a phalanx of tanks spacemen bins of Lego who lego-tise with Mechano to silently mechanise an action force battling the mice at night knights fight the thirty years war again trains who rail road round water pipes where the eaves heave to make way for armies of hand painted Orcs who stalk Ellven-lords seeking boxes who know with boxes they're more, much, much more.
Pickers and Packers
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Ekphrasis 2 – Jay Arr
Until that moment it was a day like any other, no different worse or better, no one knew whether dogs did doggy things, no one cared if the wind came or blew, if dreams were dreamed or shared, somewhere it rained somewhere else it didn’t, people died the vast majority survived, there were wars, the usual stuff, on TV. Life went on, And on. We’ve all had days like this. Day that blur. The blurry blurring one into another. But there are those other all to few days in techni-colour print. 3D. Days that hammer on the memory you can’t forget. What makes these so different? Moments like this: when you turn having looked having walked away to look back.
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Elvis Head
Ekphrasis 3 - Jay Arr
On the right hand of It’s comfy here - the views are great, if a little dizzying. I can see all of Creation; His handiwork in seven days. On the other hand I’d welcome the slightly different perspective, but it’s dangerous there. Sinister. It’s where they fall from grace. Rumour is he opens his fingers. I dread the fingers. I lie here, cushioned, in the middle of His palm, just in case.
Seven deadly sins - Pride
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Ekphrasis 4 – Jay Arr
Prague Those mist-ful mornings: when the city becomes a fan unfolding before us a sea shell spiraling the sound of itself and the pretty girls we’ll never see again on those somnambulant Sundays: while the city sleeps, satisfied like the bridegroom’s sloven shadows that creep along backstreet bars where we played dominos their click clacks echoing through fabulous afternoons as the city stammers; shakes its head at babies climbing towers, the suspense of a man suspended over art deco graffiti, a velvet history all but forgotten, slammed shut those painted evenings: the city dressed, competes out-starring Fred n’ Ginger’s constellation of windows, these now all too often, parties of stags and hens who bawl n’ puke through raucous nights, the city shudders, recalls: the drab decades, the bitter bile of servitude, the immolation exchanged for grossed-out souvenir Czech-me-out T-shirts, and those beautiful, lost, longed-for early dawns in the back street bars, when the shadows spiraled on the shuck of dominos played with pretty girls we’ll never see again.
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Travellers in Italy
Ekphrasis 5 – Jay Arr
Strange sonnet for Tony 27 Feb 2008.
strange how landscape permeates, you’d think feet would absorb contours, rifts and rills but no, it’s the eyes that drink. yesterday on a local hill the heart’s blown wide open by blue becoming green, a train of clouds chuffs west to east, everywhere the land beast stirs: trees bare, about to flush, the shimmered rush of distant traffic, while fields plough expectant furrows, the grass is saying come, sit. stare.
Towards Faringdon
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Brief Biographies Jay Arr
is a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets. He has given readings, workshops and managed poetry cafes for several years. IMPpress has published one collection and two pamphlets of his poetry. His alter ego, John Richardson designs websites and has just published the second edition of his e-zine.
Elinor Brooks says: “There is a thin line between the time-bound world of our senses and the world of our imaginative empathy: I like to cross these borders in my poetry. I was born in Edinburgh, love romantic landscapes, and when I'm not writing can be found in the pub playing an Oriental strategy board game called Go.”
Teresa Davey has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Queen's University, Belfast. Born in Brighton, now based in Swindon, she has lived in Ireland, Germany and Libya. While her short stories and poetry have been published in various literary magazines she is looking for a publisher for her three novels.
Cormac Davey, is Teresa’s son and a qualified Coach and Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner, Cormac describes his work as "a passion to support people & organisations to achieve their dreams and reach their greatest potential through clearer thinking and practical action". He is a professional member of the International College of Holistic Medicine, a trained Mountain & Expedition Leader and is a member of the British Mountaineering Council. His website is http://www.indigogiraffe.co.uk
Claire Dyer writes poetry and fiction and works part-time for an HR research forum in London. She is widely published and, as a Brickwork Poet, has performed conversations in poetry on set themes at venues around the UK. She recently completed an MA in Victorian Literature & Culture at The University of Reading.
Raúl Gallardo was born on December 22 1982 in Leon Mexico. He tried to fit with the novelists, short story writers and screenwriters in every possible genre until he discovered poets where the only club he felt authentic and unique. A finalist for the 2008 Wergle Flomp humor contest, his poems and stories have appeared in online magazines such as Pens on Fire, Neon Magazine and The Cynic. His poem “Wonderwall” appeared in Sheila Bender book Creative Writing Demystified.
Rebecca Gethin has lived on Dartmoor for 27 years and currently teaches creative writing in a prison. Her first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, was published in 2009. Her first novel, Liar Dice, won the Cinnamon Press Novel Writing Award, has now been published and is available at: www.cinnamonpress.com/liardice/
Stephen P. Holton was born in 1983 in Southampton, though grew up in nearby Totton. Since then he moved back across the city to the Woolston area where he now lives. He currently work as an electrician, whilst attending various writing groups and performance evenings in his spare time
Rosie Jackson lives on the Dorset coast and runs writing workshops in health care. She's taught at the University of East Anglia, published four books, had poetry in Ambit, Tears in the Fence, set for GCSE, and made into a copper sculpture by Andrew Whittle in the grounds of a Dorchester hospital. www.rosiejackson.org.uk
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Brief Biographies Claudia Anne Krizay was born in Washington D.C. she writes, paints, does collage and digiart with a unique voice. Claudia expresses her love for nature and how she deals with major mental illness through her art and poetry. She loves long walks in the woods in solitude and is inspired by the beauty of the woods and expresses her pain and/or love of nature through her art work. Claudia has published three books of art and poetry- Take Five Seroquel and Call Me in the Morning , Far Out and Time Lapse that are available for sale on www2.xlibris.com
David King lives in Salisbury and began to write poetry 6 years ago while studying creative writing at Winchester University. He has been most influenced by Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Billy Collins. He reads at Salisbury Poetry Cafe where he aims to offer work that is accessible but intriguing.
Andrew McCallum is from Biggar, in the south of Scotland, where he lives with his wife and three children. His work has been widely published in print journals and on the web. He is the convenor of Biggar Writers Group and Secretary of the Brownsbank Committee, which curates the last home of the European Modernist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, and offers funded retreats under the Scottish Government's Creative Futures programme. David R. Morgan teaches 11-19 year olds in Luton, and lives in Bedfordshire . David has been an arts worker and literature officer, organizer of book festivals and writer-in-residence for education authorities, Littlehay Prison and Fairfield Psychiatric Hospital (which was the subject of a Channel 4 film, Out of Our Minds). He has had two plays screened on ITV and over 200 hundred poems published in national and international poetry magazines
Stephen Morris says on his website http://www.stephen-morris.net that: “ . . . he has published 10 books of poetry, one volume of children's stories and one play. Five of his plays have been produced and over the years his work has appeared on Radio and Television. During the last twenty years he has had over fifty one man exhibitions and his work has been shown in many group exhibitions. In the 1970's and 80's Stephen Morris gave over 1000 performances of his poetry. His work has appeared in a number of magazines, journals and periodicals including: The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Peace News, Rolling Stone and Twentieth Century Magazine.”
Alex Nodopaka originally exhibited in Russia, 1940. Studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco. Presently author, artist, art judge & art editor at http://www.mannequinenvy.com but considers his past irrelevant as he seeks new reincarnations & acting parts in IFC movies.
Mo Needham
started his poetry studies in Swindon at the BlueGate plant in 2010. He was a successful engineer but will always be Apprentice Poet (No 3). All his stories and poems, warts and all, are published on his website www.Original-Short-Stories.co.uk it is called The Adventures of a Strange Mind, he thinks that says it all.
Wullie Purcell is an ex- fireman and IT manager and writes short stories, children’s stories and poetry. He has published a poetry pamphlet entitled Looking Through Glasses. Wullie is a founder member of Read Raw Ltd, a writers collective formed to promote creative writing in Scotland, see http://www.readrawltd.co.uk
Ankita Saxena
was commended in the Foyles Young Poets of the Year award, and shortlisted in the Wicked's Young Writer's Award. She has been on an Arvon Course in West Yorkshire, and in her spare time I enjoys reading Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy.
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Brief Biographies Jill Sharp works as an associate lecturer with the Open University – the best work in the world, teaching adults who are returning to study, and eager to learn. She also enjoys running a local life writing group. Jill is a member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets.
Fiona Sinclair‘s work has been published in numerous reputable publications in both the UK and USA. Her second pamphlet A game of hide and seek is due out late 2011 by Indigo Dream Press UK.
Murali Sivaramakrishnan poet, painter and critic, Professor and Head of the Department of English, Pondicherry University, India is the author of The Mantra of Vision (1997) and a number of critical essays and four volumes of poetry.) His poems have been noted for their genuineness of feeling and sensitivity to form. Murali has held more than 14 solo exhibitions of his works in India and abroad. His blog site is: http://smuralis.wordpress.com
Francina Smalls-Joyner was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in March of 1973, but grew up on Historic St. Helena Island, South Carolina. In December 1995, she graduated from the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina with a B.A. in Art History and a B.F.A. in Studio Art with Concentrations in Painting. Currently, Francina is the Volunteer Services and Visual Arts Coordinator for the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs. http://www.FrancinaSmalls.com
Jason Sturner’s
publishing credits include Nomad’s Choir, Time & Space Magazine, and The DuPage Valley Review, as well as one book of poetry and three chapbooks. He is from the Chicago area but currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Ray Succre lives on the southern Oregon coast, U.S., with his wife and son. He has had poems published in Aesthetica, Gloom Cupboard, and Pank, as well as in numerous others, across as many countries. His novels Tatterdemalion (2008) and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print. Mike Watts as born in an area of Kingston-Upon-Hull better known for its ‘downs’ than its ‘ups’, which hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the leading, and most admired writers in the land once ruled by the great British poet, Philip Larkin. Delivering lines observed through an eye which is notably humane, Witty and sharp. He is also the co-founder and co-host of ‘Write to Speak’, which is Yorkshire’s only Theatre based spoken word/poetry event. His first anthology – Coming to a street near you has just been released by Night Publishing.
Kristina Zimbakova is a painter and poetry translator from English into Macedonian. She has published the books of translations Sylvia Plath: Selected Poems (2005) and Anne Sexton: Selected Poems (2011). Kristina’s literature background informs her paintings in a variety of ways, and contributes to her interdisciplinary approach to visual art. Her mixedmedia artworks are a subtle confession, see her website: www.esnips.com/user/kriszimb
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