Poetry News (Winter 2021) by The Poetry Society

Winter 2021

POETRY NEWS The Newspaper of The Poetry Society www.poetrysociety.org.uk

WORLD WORDS COP26 diaries by Jacqueline Saphra and Daniel Clark

MADE TO LAST? Sujata Bhatt selects your ‘Survival & Extinction’ poems

CHOICE READS Poetry News writers choose their books of the year

WRITE MORE! Tim Relf shares poets’ top tips

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Welcoming our new Canal Laureate

he Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust are delighted to announce Roy McFarlane as Britain’s new Canal Laureate. Roy grew up in Birmingham and the Black Country, surrounded by canals. He says, “I lived, played and loved by canals and rivers. I’m looking forward to recapturing those stories, stories of diverse communities in urban settings who lived with canals in their backyard.” Having retraced old routes along his local towpath during lockdown, Roy hopes to share his experience of

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waterways as sites and spaces for wellbeing and as an aide to mental health. He is interested in uncovering how the canal network’s development maps on to our national and global history. “I’ll be exploring stories of women, labour and migration in the building of these canals, and how that contributed to the Industrial Revolution with its hidden histories of colonialism and imperialism,” he says. Roy is a former Birmingham Poet Laureate and was shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Ted Hughes Award for

his collection The Healing Next Time. His third collection is published by Nine Arches next year. He will take up the role of Canal Laureate in December, following in the wake of poets Nancy Campbell (Canal Laureate 2018-19), Luke Kennard (2016-17) and Jo Bell (2013-15). His first project is already planned: to take a canal walk on the shortest day of the year, followed by return visits on the Equinoxes and the longest day. waterlines.org.uk s

Roy McFarlane, Britain’s new Canal Laureate.

A universal connection

Clockwise from top left: Cheryl Moskowitz; Coral Rumble; Isobel Chappell; Leon Ganje Day; Vasilis Vasiliou.

Festive treat

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oet-educators Coral Rumble and Cheryl Moskowitz were on hand to help Year 6 pupils Isobel Chappell, Leon Ganje Day and Vasilis Vasiliou, of St Saviour’s Church of England Primary School in Westminster, polish their performance of Sinéad Photo: Hayley Madden for The Poetry Society

Morrissey’s poem ‘The Fourth King’, for the lighting-up ceremony welcoming the Christmas tree to London’s Trafalgar Square on 2 December. Isobel, Leon and Vasilis gave a delightful reading of Sinéad’s poem, which was specially commissioned by The Poetry Society, to a massed crowd including Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, the Lord Mayor of Westminster, the Norwegian Ambassador, VIP guests, choirs, and members of the public. > Ctd, p. 2

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he Poetry Society and partners 59 Productions and Stemettes have launched About Us, a major new poetry and science show that will include a competition and education project for young people. About Us is the first in a series of ten sensational projects commissioned for UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a nationwide celebration of creativity in 2022. Developed in collaboration with poets and scientists across the UK, About Us is a largescale public event for all ages that combines live shows and multimedia installations to tell the story of the infinite ways in which we are connected to the universe, natural world, and one another, from the Big Bang to the present day. An epic projection-mapping show, complete with a new soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney,

performances by local choirs, and poetry written by local children, will tour five locations in the UK in spring 2022. Join us in Paisley, Derry, Caernarfon, Luton or Hull for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Visit aboutus.earth for more details. s For more on About Us, see p. 15

POETRY NEWS

A letter from the director

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The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; The world’s whole sap is sunk – John Donne

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is the year’s midnight, and we’re in metaphysical mood... Scots Makar Kathleen Jamie, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and Welsh National Poet Ifor ap Glyn are getting ready to read entries to The Poetry Society’s new writing challenge for young people, as part of the collaborative About Us project. They’ll join a team of poets and scientists including Stephen Sexton, Keith Jarrett and the mathematician and computer scientist Anne-Marie Imafidon, who will be selecting young people’s poems to feature in a soundtrack by composer Nitin Sawhney as part of an exciting touring show in the spring. You have until 9 January to send us your poems – so spread the word among our under-18s to put these dark mid-winter days to poetic use and share thoughts about the interconnected

universe. Whether it’s the mysterious fungal underworld of the wood-wide web that inspires you, our place in space, or the community of microorganisms partying on your eyelashes, let’s open up a world of wonder. Enter at aboutus.earth The live shows, with stunning visual projections, begin in Paisley in early March, before moving on to Derry, Caernarfon, Luton and Hull. Catch a live manifestation if you can, but we’ll also be creating digital experiences. There are new learning resources for schools, we’re publishing new commissions from poets including Jen Hadfield, Caleb Parkin, Cheryl Moskowitz, Jason Allen-Paisant, Grug Muse, Khairani Barokka and Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, and showcasing an evolving anthology of poems by young people. Double congratulations are in order in Lewes, for one of poetry’s most celebrated couples, and dear friends of The Poetry Society. John Agard became the first poet to win BookTrust’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, then hot off the press comes the news that Grace Nichols has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in Guyana, Nichols has been a pioneering voice in the British poetry scene since the 1970s. Says Nichols, “I wish my parents who used to chide me for straining my eyes, as a small girl reading by torchlight in bed, were around to share in this journey that poetry has blessed me with.” On behalf of all my colleagues, I send warmest wishes to all our Poetry Society members. Fair speed to our publications as they battle the postal service through another Covid Christmas. Here’s to torchlight, reading, the blessings of shared journeys, and a very happy New Year.s Judith Palmer

Coming up in The Poetry Review

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oin us for the online launch of the winter issue of The Poetry Review on 26 January 2022, for readings by contributors Tiffany Atkinson, Stephanie Burt, Asmaa Jama and Sam Riviere. Tiffany Atkinson’s latest collection Lumen (Bloodaxe, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Stephanie Burt’s most recent books include After Callimachus (2020) and Don’t Read Poetry: a Book About How to Read Poems (2019). Asmaa Jama is an inaugural alumna of Obsidian Foundation. Sam Riviere is the author of the novel Dead Souls and three books of poetry. Launch tickets are free but space is limited – be sure to book yourself a place at

bit.ly/reviewlaunchwinter The latest issue brings you the sad news that next year’s spring issue will be the last under our esteemed editor Emily Berry. In her editorial to the winter issue, Emily introduces Andre Bagoo and Richard Scott as joint guest editors of the summer issue. Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer from Trinidad and the author of several books of poetry including Pitch Lake (Peepal Tree Press, 2017). Richard Scott’s acclaimed debut Soho is published by Faber. • Our warmest thanks to Leah Jun Oh who, as part of this year’s Ledbury Emerging Critics programme, joined The Poetry Review team to assist with

Festive treat, ctd

New to the team

< Ctd, p. 1 They were among the hundreds of schoolchildren who participated in The Poetry Society’s workshops in four schools across the London Borough of Westminster. Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘The Fourth King’ appears on a banner, beautifully designed by Marcus Walters, which surrounds the tree. View it if you can – it is on display until 6 January 2022.s For more about this year’s Look North More Often project, see p. 15

Clockwise from top left: The Poetry Review cover image by Kate Dehler; our winter issue launch readers: Stephanie Burt, Tiffany Atkinson, Asmaa Jama and Sam Riviere; Ledbury Emerging Critics fellow and Review assistant Leah Jun Oh.

the winter issue. Leah worked alongside editor Emily Berry on the reviews section, but also engaged with the wider editorial and production processes of making the magazine. She also commissioned our online

features Behind the Poem and In Front of the Poem. s Visit poetry-festival.co.uk and liverpool. ac.uk/new-and-international-writing for more on the Ledbury Emerging Critics programme.

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warm welcome to Susannah Gorgeous and Rachel Cleverly who have recently joined The Poetry Society team. Susannah joins as our new Head of Operations, after five years as Executive Director and Co-Executive Director at Streetwise Opera, a charity that works with

From left: Susannah Gorgeous; Rachel Cleverly; Julia Bird, Natasha Ryan and Helen Bowell of The Poetry Society education team with Director Judith Palmer.

homeless people. Rachel Cleverly joins our education team as Education Officer, with principal responsibility

for the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award. She is a programmer, producer and poet and has been working at Clore Leadership, training change-makers in arts and culture, for the last two years. s

POETRY NEWS

The miracle of the Christmas menu A.B. Jackson on fantastic voyages, home thoughts and comfort food

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f all the feast days in the Christian calendar, it is Christmas that has become most defined by food. In fact, in our secular times, it is a food festival above all, albeit one that retains traces of the miraculous and a variety of compelling rituals. Wherever one is in the world, the day must have its order of nibbles, its main menu, its afters. And this feverish requirement for food, glorious food, only serves to highlight, for some, the perilous lack of it. In this article I want to take you on a tour of Christmastimes in extremis, as experienced by St Brendan, the Irish saint, navigator and subject of my latest collection, and by those who may be regarded as his successors: the polar adventurers of the early twentieth century. For all these travellers, rations were meagre, home was a distant memory, and the very existence of luxury foodstuffs appeared to be the result of magical intervention. In the earliest version of the legend of St Brendan – the ninth-century Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis – the action follows the yearly feast days, and this framework provides a sense of familiarity no matter what mythical creatures and weird island communities the seafaring saint encounters. So, in one of the best-known episodes, Brendan and his band of monks land on what they assume is a low-humped island, light a fire to cook a meal, and suddenly find themselves being tipped off the back of an enormous whale. It is Easter Sunday, and, in their circular sea-voyaging, they will spend Easter Sunday on the back of that same whale the following year – for a meal of uncooked fish, presumably, to avoid scorching that accommodating cetacean. For their Christmas feast, Brendan and his crew are guests of the island community of Ailbe. In John J. O’Meara’s translation, they are served “with loaves of extraordinary whiteness and some roots of incredible sweetness”. It turns out, however, that the food arrives by divine means: “We have no idea where the loaves that you see are baked or who carries them to our larder. What we do know is that they are given to his servants from the great charity of God by means of some dependant creature.” The creature is not named, but the Middle Dutch version of the Brendan story (upon which my own book is based) includes a similar remote island of monks with a surprising food delivery system: We drink the dew. Our food arrives by raven, one loaf one fish, our drop, our daily ration. It is no less a miracle of grace (though by more circuitous and ghostly means) when the prize turkey of prodigious proportions arrives on the Cratchits’ doorstep at the end of A Christmas Carol. Food scarcity is a defining feature of early seafaring exploits, particularly to the polar regions. While Brendan set out to find a Land of Promise (via the Faroes and Iceland, some suggest), adventurers like Scott and Shackleton made a dash for the South Pole with similar dietary shortfalls, and the same desire to mark Christmas Day in unhomely conditions. On 25 December 1902, Scott and Shackleton were sledging together in the Antarctic wastes and within striking distance of the Pole. Due to starvation rations, the team had been having nightmarish food dreams: for example, as recorded by Scott, “they are in the act of lifting a dainty morsel to their mouth when they fall over a precipice”. On that day, as the moraleboosting festive rations were being prepared, Scott noticed Shackleton “ferreting about in his bundle, out of which he presently produced a spare sock, and stowed away in the toe of that sock was a small round object about the size of a cricket ball, which when brought to light, proved to be a noble ‘plum-pudding’.” A neat conjuring trick, and a nice twist on the

Linocut illustration by Kathleen Neeley, kathleenneeley. com

Christmas stocking – the journey of that pudding alone is an epic tale. In the upside-down sublimity of Antarctica, Captain Scott and his Terra Nova crew celebrated Christmas Day on 22 June 1911 – Midwinter Day – in their expedition hut at Cape Evans. Scott’s diary entry lays out the menu: “Beginning on seal soup [...] we went on to roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, fried potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Then followed a flaming plum-pudding and excellent mince pies, and thereafter a dainty savoury of anchovy and cod’s roe […] the table was strewn with dishes of burnt almonds, crystallised fruits, chocolates and such toothsome kickshaws...” With the exception of the seal soup, how familiar this menu is! Incredible to think they transported those Brussels sprouts in the Terra Nova all the way to Antarctica for just this occasion. But the stage had to be set in faithful detail for it to be considered a ‘proper’ Christmas, even down to the unloved sprout. The years-long sea journey, real or mythical, brings with it the need to feel somehow at home. The perils, real or imagined, are reflected in the recurring medieval tropes of being devoured by sea monsters, or by the jaws of Hell – every creature and every devil is insatiable. By keeping to the calendar of feast days, and gathering with fellow travellers for a familiar slice of bird or hunk of cake or bottle of fizz, the uncertainties of the year can be held, briefly, at bay. s The Voyage of St Brendan by A.B. Jackson, illustrated by Kathleen Neeley, is available from Bloodaxe Books.

POETRY NEWS

In brief News & upcoming events

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Top Marks to Odubanjo We salute Gboyega Odubanjo, the winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award for his pamphlet Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business). He wins £5,000 and a residency with the Harvard Alumni Association/ Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece. Congratulations too to Katy Alston, who won the Illustration Award for her work in Fan-Peckled (Fair Acre Press), with poems by Jean Atkin, and ignitionpress, winner of the 2021 Publishers’ Award. Theatre for your ears Sonic theatre-makers Soundworlds have launched a new season of podcasts, offering immersive audio experiences combining theatre, poetry and music. Season Two includes a drama based around John K. Samson’s poem ‘Liminal Highway’, as well as pieces exploring sex work, Universal Childcare and more. All episodes are free to listen to on Spotify, iTunes or other podcast platforms, and on the Soundworlds website. soundworlds.org Toutoungi wins Ledbury Munthe Congratulations to Claudine Toutoungi, winner of the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021 for Two Tongues (Carcanet). Sandeep Parmar, cojudge with Naomi Shihab Nye, praised it as “a masterclass in language and form, [...] a voice that is brimming with intelligence and humour”. poetry-festival.co.uk Amy Wack’s Seren send-off Best wishes to Amy Wack, who has stepped down after thirty years as Seren poetry editor. “Amy has nurtured, promoted and championed poets from Wales and beyond,” say Seren. “Her editing has been marked by her fine ear [...] and an editorial élan.” Read about Amy’s experiences at bit.ly/amywackseren s

“A way of happening, a mouth” Poetry shared its message at the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2021, COP26, held in Glasgow this autumn. Here, Jacqueline Saphra of Poets for the Planet and Daniel Clark of The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network reflect on their experiences

A cumulative voice Jacqueline Saphra

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y trip to Glasgow for the Poets for the Planet event at COP26 began inauspiciously as I sat soaking wet in a black cab during a howling rainstorm, having failed to make it to Euston station by tube. It didn’t take long for the cab driver to ask me where I was going. So I told him about Earthsong, a multilingual collaboration between climate scientists and poets from all over the world, supported by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. I explained that the project began by bringing poets and scientists together in dialogue and later combined multilingual live performances and videos of the commissioned poems that emerged from the collaborations. As poet Susie Campbell, one of the organising committee alongside Ian McLachlan, Debra Watson and Robin Lamboll, put it: “The decision to seek out poets representing as many COP languages as possible was to ensure its inclusivity... [T]here was a growing sense among most environmental activist groups that the role of the UK at COP should be to foreground voices from the Global South and those countries most immediately affected by climate change.” The cab driver was amused that I thought poetry could influence people’s behaviour, explaining kindly that we need our cars, bananas and holidays abroad. Poetry, of all things, he added, definitely couldn’t affect that. But here at last was Euston, resplendent with luminous pink and yellow signage: “The world is looking to you COP26”. I felt supported, significant, political; I thought about the many times I’d heard Auden reductively quoted as saying “poetry makes nothing happen” in his ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, when in fact, as he pointed out: “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth”. I wanted to be that way of happening, I wanted to be that mouth; I was so ready for the big event. And so it was with joy and determination that I boarded the train to Glasgow, blissfully unaware that the train would later be cancelled due to a fallen tree and I’d end up sitting for anxious hours on the cold station floor alongside many others. Imagine my relief when I finally found myself on a Glasgow-bound train that afternoon, proudly explaining to the woman opposite that I was headed for COP26. It didn’t occur to me that she was a climate denier, and so were the people sitting around me. I took notes as

they swapped videos and conspiracy theories: “Look at this: it says here they’re lying about the polar bears dying: their population’s increasing eighty percent a year” and “Do you know what powers electric cars? Diesel!” I found the closing lines from Donald Justice’s ‘Pantoum of the Great Depression’ echoing through me: “We have our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues, / But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy. // And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.” Because, after three hours of this, I too was devoid of poetry, especially when our train headed back to London due to ‘extreme weather conditions’ – a classic case of pathetic fallacy. Back at Euston, where I’d started out nine hours previously, I stared, nonplussed, furious and disappointed at the huge sign: “Thank you for travelling by train”. But meanwhile, and happily, my compadres from Poets for the Planet did manage to wend their way to Glasgow along the wounded tracks. And yes, despite the apocalyptic changing weather patterns and the chaos of the COP26 IT systems, Earthsong went on, live and virtually. From the comfort of my own home I wept as I watched it because there was something both healing and incontrovertible about the cumulative quality of voices in many languages all speaking of the avoidable humanmade tragedy engulfing the planet. There was a discernible power in this collective creation that described and created connections across languages, seas and continents, and maybe – maybe – even built some bridges. The audience proved to be additional stars of the show, asking engaged and challenging questions, particularly around the connections and differences between science and poetry. Susie Campbell said, “One of the striking aspects of the Earthsong event is its emotional range and variety. There are poems of grief, anger, celebration, hope and despair. Poetry doesn’t just combine intellectual knowledge with feelings and embodied knowledge, it is also able to communicate the nuances and emotional complexity of an almost impossibly huge crisis. Poetry is also able to reflect on how language itself can be implicated in political and cultural crises and can inspire imaginative and creative new responses where old thinking is no longer working.” Now, as I write, it’s the last day of COP26 and the devastating news of the last-minute, hubristic refusal to listen to the science has been revealed. I can only hold on to Auden’s words, that poetry “survives / in the valley of its own making”, and also to the thoughts of Dr Robin Lamboll: “Poetry can access levels of emotional response that science struggles to reach. Poetry is not oratory and is best aimed at digesting what we already half-understand, or to present something completely unknown. To defamiliarise ourselves into feeling what we know, and to provide reflection space so we can know what we feel.”s View Earthsong at bit.ly/earthsongcop26 Twitter: @poets4theplanet • Instagram: @poetsfortheplanet

POETRY NEWS

In brief News & upcoming events

• Kathleen Jamie. Photo: Robin Gillanders

The Global Day of Action for Climate Justice march, Glasgow, 6 November 2021. Photo © Quentin Bruno.

What more needs saying? Daniel Clark

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n a climate emergency, why read poetry? Despite my unwavering adoration of words, I was still asking myself this question when I boarded the 10.45am train from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh along with a group of fellow young poets chosen to perform at COP26. We were staying in Edinburgh because Glasgow’s hotels had presumably already been snapped up by some of the many leaders and executives arriving from around the world, who together produced more emissions travelling to COP26 than thousands of Glaswegians generate in an entire year. The week before the event, I was given the chance to speak to Samira Ahmed on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row about my winning poem in the Young Poets Network Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis challenge, a wonderful experience but one that had left me wondering how words can ever bring about climate justice. What more needs saying? The world is warming, the seas are rising, weather is becoming more and more extreme. When will words turn into meaningful action, promises into structural change, platitudes into vegan plates? On Saturday 6 November, we arrived by train in Glasgow, entered the Green Zone – named, perhaps, after all the greenwashing companies housed within – and made our way to the Tower Base North auditorium. There, we performed poetry: five young poets (with a further five joining virtually from abroad), speaking our own truths and speaking out for the environment. In the evening, I was given a further chance to

perform at Defra’s Nature and Land-Use event, where it became clearer that the current climate conversation is broken. A youth panel discussed climate action over the hubbub of delegates swapping business cards at the back of the room. My own performance of ‘tesco, 9.51pm’, an anti-meat poem, received warm applause but didn’t seem to deter many people from tucking into the beef canapés. But listening to the other young poets convinced me that poetry has a part to play in the world’s slow transition to sustainability. Poetry is a conversation, a meaningful exchange of personal and collective views. Unlike political negotiation, poetry doesn’t have to be confrontational: people listen and respond to each other’s words and invite future responses through their own. Maybe that’s what made the poems feel so urgent and necessary: after a week of empty words from politicians, it stung when Aliyah Begum said, “But you don’t listen, distracted by the / Sound of an engine fading further away”. COP26 has been described as “our last, best hope” (Alok Sharma), “a compromise” (António Guterres) and “Blah, blah, blah” (Greta Thunberg). COP26 has shown that it’s time to listen to the planet and to young people who care about the planet. For me, the experience was cathartic and unforgettable and I’m incredibly grateful to Young Poets Network and People Need Nature for the opportunity. Amidst all the empty words and broken promises, it is clear there is a place for poetry in a climate emergency. Poems might not solve the climate crisis, but they are a worthwhile contribution to the conversation. s As a winner of the Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis Challenge, run by The Poetry Society’s global Young Poets Network in partnership with People Need Nature, Daniel Clark read at the showcase event, “where were you / when the seas / were warming?”, held at COP26, Glasgow, on 6 November 2021. His fellow readers were Maggie Wang, Aliyah Begum, Renée Orleans-Lindsay and Mags Dixon, and they were joined via a live stream by international winners Jayant Kashyap, Brooke Nind, Sabrina Guo, Irma Kiss Barath and Yvanna Vien Tica. View the video of the event online at bit.ly/ypncop26

Jamie headlines StAnza 2022 StAnza, one of Europe’s leading literary festivals, will bring a dynamic mix of audio and digital, live and virtual events to a worldwide audience from its festival hub in St Andrews, 9-13 March 2022. Poets confirmed so far include Scots Makar Kathleen Jamie, Luke Kennard, Robin Robertson, Holly Pester, Nicole Sealey, Yang Lian and Paul Muldoon, with many more to come. stanzapoetry.org Another happy birthday Keats! Poetry Society staff, members of the Keats Foundation and Keats fans visited Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 1 November for a short service to mark what would have been the poet’s 226th birthday. Ruth Padel read ‘Night Singing in a Time of Plague’, a poem commissioned by The Poetry Society as part of Keats200, and Ellora Sutton read Keats’s ‘To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent’. A short prayer was said by The Venerable Tricia Hillas, Canon in Residence. The service was followed later that day by a City of London Keats200 celebratory event at Guildhall, with a lecture by Keats’ biographer Nicholas Roe and a terrific reading of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by Foyler Fiyinfoluwa Oladipo. s

POETRY NEWS

In brief News & upcoming events

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Prize poems safely delivered Our National Poetry Competition judges Fiona Benson, David Constantine and Rachel Long have safely received the entries for this year’s competition – over 16,500 poems from more than a hundred countries worldwide. They will be reading avidly over the coming weeks, preparing to meet and make their decisions about the ten top winners in early 2022. Be assured, The Poetry Society will keep you posted on developments! Poetry Society AGM 2021 A huge thank you to the members who joined us at The Poetry Society AGM held via Zoom on 30 November 2021. Full details of The Poetry Society’s year can be found in the Annual Report 2021, which can be viewed and downloaded at bit.ly/tpsannualreports We were delighted to welcome poet and educationalist Casey Bailey to the board and warm thanks were paid to outgoing Trustee Mairi Johnson; Andrew Neilson and Ann Casey Bailey Phillips were elected for a second term. The formal business was followed by readings by Kayo Chingonyi, a former guest editor of The Poetry Review and shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize; Jane Wilkinson, winner of The Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize; Sarah Wimbush, Stanza Competition winner; and Foyle winner Ahana Banerji. Recent Poetry Society film poems were also screened. Verve Birmingham’s return Tickets have gone on sale for Birmingham’s much-loved Verve Poetry Festival, 16-20 February 2022, with poets including Nina Mingya Powles, Stephanie Sy-Quia, Phoebe Stuckes, Kim Moore, Parwana Fayyaz, Leo Boix, Ian Duhig, plus The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Takeover. vervepoetryfestival.coms

Ways of escape Kate Birch on a project recovering the erased histories of runaway slaves

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oets Momtaza Mehri, Gboyega Odubanjo, Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Abena Essah and Memoona Zahid, along with artists Olivia Twist and Tasia Graham, have been working on a project which involves creative responses to runaway slave advertisements in London newspapers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the 1650s and 1780s, many hundreds of enslaved people were brought to London, most of them African, although a significant minority were South Asian. Some attempted to escape and were successful. The average age of the runaways was sixteen. As part of the project, which is managed by Spread The Word, the poets and artists delved into historical documents – including hundreds of these advertisements – from the University of Glasgow’s Runaway Slaves in Britain archive. The project has generated a film by Ashley Karrell, an anthology published by Ink Sweat & Tears Press and schools resources for Key Stages 3 and 4. As Momtaza Mehri writes in her introduction: “Every advertisement is a testament to an audacious desire for freedom that could not be suppressed, even under limitless terror. Each escape reaffirmed a humanity that had been denied. Could these runaways speak for themselves, without patronage or pageantry? What worlds did they build with their fragile freedom? What had they given up to be free?” There was very little information in the archive on the enslaved people themselves. Their names, if these were attributed to them, were Anglicised or imposed; they were dressed in their masters’ clothes; they were defined by almost everything that they were not. The creatives attempted to reconfigure that white lens. Each poet and artist approached the project differently. Momtaza brought into sharp focus “the violence of being a decorative object”, a status signifier, for those young, enslaved children who can be found in the portraits of the time. Gboyega Odubanjo concentrated on the significance of the “unnaming”. “I wanted to highlight the names of the runaways,” he says. “So much of what we know about them is from the perspective of slavers. In their names there is a link between the enslaved people and their homes, a link that enslavers were constantly trying to break. I wanted to try to present the essence of their lives and names were a way for me to access that. I also wanted to highlight the fact that, despite the fact enslaved people were so far from home, in their struggles for freedom they were able to find a kind of home in the communities of runaways that existed in London.” Memoona Zahid’s approach was to devote a single long poem to a single advertisement and an unnamed fifteen-year-old “Indian black girl” and, by giving her a name and a history, write into the “possibility” of her life. Oluwaseun Olayiwola explored the complexity and

Blooming Communities in the East by Olivia Twist. © The artist

bravery of the freedom seekers and queer narratives – what it meant to have and be a body in a system of chattel slavery where agency was violently restricted. Underpinning Abena Essah’s response was a profound sense of community and of how the violence of the lives of freedom-seekers “is mapped onto modern day realities for Black communities in London”. In her series of illustrations, Tasia Graham showed the “forgotten” journey of enslaved people from Africa; the life of an enslaved woman; her escape and recapture; and finally her life as a free woman in Britain with neither African identity nor British acceptance. Olivia Twist celebrated the strength and resilience of enslaved people, with images of Black balls, finding love and “Blooming Communities” in East London. For her, it was those small glimmers of joy that sang. The Runaways London Project was launched at the Museum of London Docklands on 21 October to an audience of poets, academics, museum workers and employees of City institutions such as Lloyd’s of London and Mansion House, the early histories of which are bound up in the trade of enslaved people. It proved a clear example of how poetry and the creative arts can help to effect change. As insurance executive Ola Jacob Raji noted afterwards: “It’s so important that when we are pushing for equality (or at least progress), the delivery isn’t from the expected/usual characters. You had a diverse crowd in the room, and that change of perspective is massive.” “This project reaffirmed to me the idea that violence and violent acts don’t exist in a vacuum; these things don’t just happen once without further impact,” Gboyega adds. “Removing people from their homes was a violence; enslaving them was another; their names were taken from them, their children; and, although we try to honour them today, that violence continues as we mine their lives for meaning. The violence continues in the way black and brown people are treated in this country after all these years. I think this project as a whole tries to interrogate those violences and poke holes in them, hoping that something better can come through.”s Runaway Slaves in Britain archive: runaways.gla.ac.uk • Runaways London film and school resources packs: spreadtheword.org.uk/runaways • The Runaways London anthology: inksweatandtears.co.uk/product/runaways-london

POETRY NEWS

Poetry, sharing and shelter

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enga’ is a powerful new film poem developed by housing and homelessness charity Shelter, in collaboration with poet and workshop leader Will Harris, and nine contributing poets with lived experience of homelessness and bad housing. It is an emotive and thought-provoking first-hand account of the devastating impact these experiences have on people’s mental and physical health, at a time when one in three adults in Britain are impacted by the housing emergency. The nine poets worked with Will over four sessions, reading poems by Tom Leonard, Zheng Xiaoqiong, Alando McIntyre and Wanda Coleman, and writing poems inspired by their work. The film poem takes the form of a renga – a series of linked stanzas penned by multiple poets – and the title ‘Jenga’ was suggested by Tracey, one of the participating poets. “This felt appropriate,” comments Will, “to the subject and to the experiences shared: precarious structures, leaps of trust, and solidarity in spite of everything.” “Poetry is really powerful,” reflects Leah, another of the contributing poets. “Will’s introduction to renga as a collaborative poetic form provided us with some safety where we could express our stories together, rather than on our own [...] there’s some real solidarity that comes with this togetherness, where we can maintain our individual experiences but show just how diverse experiences of homelessness are.” Poet-participant Francis

Contributors to Shelter’s ‘Jenga’ film poem: Francis (above) and Leah (below). Photos: Alexandra Smart © Shelter

News & upcoming events

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also attests to the art’s unique power: “Poetry reaches places where normal words and conversations don’t. And it allows you time to digest and to take it all in.” The film poem is part of Shelter’s Fight for Home campaign, a rallying call to end the housing emergency. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, more than 180,000 households in England have lost their homes and been made homeless, and every day in England another ninety-one families become homeless. “Through their collective voice, these poets have beautifully captured the reality of life without a secure home,” writes Shelter’s Chief Executive Polly Neate. “We want to thank all the contributing poets for bravely telling their stories and helping thousands of other people facing homelessness to not feel so alone.”s

Congratulations John Agard Congratulations to John Agard, the first poet to win a BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award, for individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to children’s literature. “[John] has spread his enthusiasm and his joyous delight in words and stories to his audiences for decades and opened doors for them all as readers and writers,” said Nicolette Jones, who chaired the panel. Hello to CHEERIO Martha Sprackland, a former Foyle winner, is the head of CHEERIO Publishing’s new poetry list. A former editor for Faber, Poetry London, Unbound and others, Martha joins from Offord Road Books, which she co-founded in 2017, and which will continue to publish alongside and in partnership with CHEERIO’s programme.

Watch the film at bit.ly/shelterjenga

T.S. Eliot shortlist “in all its multivalent splendour”

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ongratulations to the poets shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize: Raymond Antrobus for All the Names Given (Picador); Kayo Chingonyi for A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus); Selima Hill for Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe); Victoria Kennefick for Eat Or We Both Starve (Carcanet); Hannah Lowe for The Kids (Bloodaxe); Michael Symmons Roberts for Ransom (Cape); Daniel Sluman for single window (Nine Arches); Joelle Taylor for C+nto & Othered Poems (The

In brief

Westbourne Press); Jack Underwood for A Year in the New Life (Faber); and Kevin Young for Stones (Cape). Many friends of The Poetry Society feature – it’s particularly exciting to see SLAMbassadors founder Joelle Taylor and SLAMbassadors winner Kayo Chingonyi. For chair of judges Glyn Maxwell, the 2021 judging process was unique and involved none of the usual sense of compromise: “Perhaps it’s about the wider background: the shock and numbness of the pandemic, the looming shadow of the climate emergency, or the menace of ignorance and delusion fuelled by the digital revolution – but something felt different. It occurred to me that one’s aesthetic might in fact literally be openness to other [...] The list we have arrived at, in all its multivalent splendour, feels to me like an organic, living response of poetry-in-English to the pressures of the age.” The prize readings are on 9 January 2022 in the Royal Festival Hall, London; they will also be livestreamed. Book at bit.ly/tsereadingss

Poetry By Heart latest Poetry By Heart will be back at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, in June 2022, following a magical Finalists’ Celebration Event there this summer. The free-to-enter poetry speaking competition offers performers a choice of three categories: Classic, Freestyle and Showcase. It welcomes a wide range of poems and styles – contestants must simply upload their solo or group performance via their school by midnight on 31 March 2022. PBH recently took fifteen finalists from the 2021 competition, along with their teachers and poets Daljit Nagra and Lemn Sissay, to 10 Downing Street, to perform for Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi. He responded with a favourite poem of his own – ‘How To Cut A Pomegranate’ by Imtiaz Dharker – and spoke about the poem’s resonance with his own life. More at poetrybyheart.org.uk s

POETRY NEWS

Members’ poems

‘Survival & Extinction’ Sujata Bhatt on anger, urgency and digital bees

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t was an uncanny experience reading these poems on the theme of survival and extinction as politicians, scientists and activists from all over the world gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit. In fact, as I write this, the meetings are far from over. I received 668 pages of poetry to read for this competition – far too many excellent poems to be included here. So please don’t feel unhappy if your poem hasn’t been chosen – it could yet find a place elsewhere. Three of the poems I’ve chosen are shaped by questions. ‘Who has seen?’ by Christine Marshall (London) is deceptively simple, each stanza beginning with the phrase “Who has seen...”. A wide variety of ordinary objects and emotional states are brought together in an almost jarring manner, creating a poem of simmering anger and quiet desperation. ‘Late Questions’ by Hilaire (London) asks the questions that often linger in one’s mind as one is leaving to go on a holiday, but hers grow increasingly ominous, culminating in what seem like last questions before annihilation. There is an intense, genuine urgency here that is well controlled and crafted. ‘What is it?’ by Pamela Crowe (Leeds) begins with a question in the title and, in the first part, as dialogue with yet more questions. In the second, the speaker contemplates the events of the day and seems to mourn quietly yet persistently over what has happened. The difficult, uneasy situation is handled with great sensitivity and honesty. The poem is a true balancing act and I

admire the poet’s skill. The speaking ‘Cornish Hedge’ by Jennie Carr (Falmouth) is wonderful: form, voice, tone, diction and sound combine perfectly within the poem. I can really hear the forthright, confident voice of this Cornish hedge. The sentences, flowing into each other without punctuation, work brilliantly. There are so many memorable and quotable lines in ‘Nan’ by Rose Proudfoot (Warrington) that I think it would be best to read the poem itself. Here the lives and minds of an old woman, ‘Nan’, and an elephant are beautifully and, yes, poignantly woven together. The speaker is immersed in grief and frustration and yet at the same time I see this poem as a rich tapestry embroidered with so many intricate details. ‘I, Bee’ by Karen Jane Cannon (Lymington) – see p. 11 – takes technology into a realm of madness where digital bees are waterproof and “pesticide friendly”. One can control the speed of the “pollinator/gatherer settings” among other things and choose between “ten national anthems, a jazz quartet, fighter jets / or other fun settings / located on the accompanying handheld console”. I enjoyed the dry, deadpan humour in this poem tremendously! Meanwhile, I discovered that in the ‘real world’ there is indeed an i-bee smart apiary system that “allows you to control the status of the apiary from all over the world”. Who knows, maybe one day digital bees will exist?s For details of our spring competition, judged by Sheri Benning, see opposite.

Pamela Crowe What is it? I We stood around it on the sand, five of us poking sticks at it. What is it? they asked. It was red and filleted, soft, pink, prone placental and the dregs of something having ebbed, now drowsy. Is it a fish? he asked. No. Not a fish, I said. It’s not moving, she said. No, I said. What is it though? he asked. Their tiny sticks pushing and flicking. Stop it. Stop it, that’s enough. Leave it, I said. But it’s dead. No, I said. I don’t think so. II I saw it, love’s vast attempt to live past tolerance and pity past hope and what’ll be. They pulled drift and weed around it to make it seem more dead and ribboned off to play in cute directions made sense only by the freezing wind. I stood near to it collecting pebbles watching over till we had to leave.

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Hilaire Late Questions Did we turn off the gas? Did we empty the fridge? Did we unplug every electrical device? Did we put out the rubbish? And the recycling? Was every jar and tin rinsed? How long until midnight? When did pets become throwaway? Did someone oil the gate? Will mushrooms populate the carpet? Who ate all the honey? If the picture frames are askew does it matter? Has someone recorded this? In what form? Would anyone want to read/watch/listen to it? What happened to answers? Who threw away the keys? Will the future occupants be happy? Will they forgive us? How will we know when it’s all over?

POETRY NEWS

Jennie Carr Cornish Hedge

Rose Proudfoot Nan

Don’t call me a bank or wall don’t ever say hedgerow I am boundary I am keeper I have miles enough to circle the earth I am iron-age bronze-age constructed by celts ancient or modern I still hold my purpose I may have grounders of granite or edgers of slate be filled with subsoil or rubble where soil’s too precious to waste I am as wide as I am high I endure a hundred years without need for repair I am bound by tree root and flower I am refuge for animal and insect I am vertical meadow eye-level ground I am roadside I am woodland I am margin of field on moor on coast in garden and street I am maker of landscape made by my landscape I am

Nan doesn’t know who I am. She shows me her picture book, we argue over the page, she says elephant! But it’s a cat. No point the nurse says let it be an elephant.

... Christine Marshall Who has seen? Who has seen the waterfall the boy’s diary the relationships the shifting topography? Who has seen the devotion the persistent concern the sperm whales sleeping the radical misinterpretations? Who has seen the first chapter the historical problems the Przewalski horse the children holding press conferences? Who has seen the unforgiving thorns the titles that explain the partisan feelings the everyday? Who has seen the working-class onion the lax building regulations the glittering space junk the weight of plastic?

Someone shouts what’s that crap on the tv? It’s not a tv, just a screen disguised as a fish tank, can’t have real fish, I suppose that is crap. (elephant not cat) Five kilos. That’s how much an elephant’s brain can weigh. During drought matriarchs lead the herd to fertile land, younger elephants don’t know where to go. Poachers target older elephants for their size, so when she dies the whole herd forgets where to find water. What ties us to the earth? When a fish is not a fish, and the dark shadow on the carpet is a deep hole? And the shadow is cast by us, peering, under a ceiling light? Stuck in loops, real/not-real, tied in knots, tied by not knowing, unknowing, undone. Her mind is a lost herd, thirsty, lowering trunks into the brain’s dust pits, chewing the sand, dirt-dry-mouthed. No one knows, someone knew once, but she’s not here anymore. When those great tusks are powdered up, or played as keys on a grand piano that squats in an ugly corner, does the dust carry scents of wet soil? Of earth that needed to be known? Listen. Birds sing near water, her song is playing in the dark. When mothers die, how many past mothers leave with them? How much is lost, how many thousands of losses? Thousands of mothers are echoing through the bleary eye of an old woman, watching a fish swim on a loop in something that isn’t water. Fragments fall through the brain’s sifting pan, too small to cling on; muddy they drop into the river, mother-water, river of lost water songs. Only fool’s gold left behind, a trick of the eye, a glint of light, refracted, wastes of wasting time. Her mind is a baby elephant, clinging on to the mother’s tail, following dutifully but too small to see. No craning of the neck can reveal the long trail, then the tail becomes a fraying rope. Elephant/ not-elephant/ cat. Let it be whatever she needs it to be. I let her elephants bathe in the mud of the watering hole. Let them drink and drink and drink.

Spring 2022 members’ poems competition: ‘Solastalgia’ Canadian poet Sheri Benning will judge the next members’ poems competition on the theme of ‘Solastalgia’. She explains, “‘Solastalgia’ is a neologism by way of the Latin sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root – algia (pain, suffering, grief). It was coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe the emotional disturbance we experience when confronted by changes to our home environments induced by escalating environmental devastation. In Canada we’ve experienced unprecedented flooding, forest fires and drought. How to articulate this state of ‘new sadness’ for beloved homeplaces irrevocably changed by anthropogenic climate catastrophe? How to cope with the anxiety of feeling homesick for where we are? Could poetry help provide a language for this new affective state?”

Members’ p oems on ‘Surviva l& Extinction’ continue on page 11

Sheri Benning’s collections include The Season’s Vagrant Light: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet), Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books) and most recently Field Requiem (Carcanet, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, Brick and PN Review. She lives in Saskatchewan, where she teaches. Please send no more than two poems on the theme of ‘Solastalgia’, maximum forty lines each, typed on A4, with your membership number, not name and address, at the foot. The deadline for entries is 15 February 2022. Poems must be unpublished as of end March 2022, our spring publication date. Winners appear in Poetry News and win books and entry into the Hamish Canham Prize. Send your poems to Poetry News, 22 Betterton St, London WC2H 9BX, or online: thepoetrysociety.submittable.com/submits

POETRY NEWS

Poetry News contributors recommend... March-songs, ecopoetics and bright portholes – it’s been a grand year for poetry. We asked Poetry News contributors of the past year to tell us which books they’ve loved. Tweet your tips at #PoetryBooks2021

• Cynthia Miller’s debut Honorifics (Nine Arches) is fearless, heartfelt and mesmerising. Myra Schneider’s Siege and Symphony (Second Light) depicts great art as spiritual sustenance. Tender, brutal, personal poems are often strikingly underscored with ethereal music in the audiobook of Raymond Antrobus’s All The Names Given (Picador). Marvin Thompson won the National Poetry Competition 2020.

Caleb Parkin’s This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches) takes ecopoetry in really imaginative directions full of queerness and compassion. Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door (Bloodaxe) blew me away from the first poem. It was a joy to encounter Kayo Chingonyi’s A Blood Condition too, musical, questing and fresh. John McCullough, one of our members’ poems competition judges, was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Gail McConnell’s The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins) multiplies voices to make paths towards healing in Belfast. Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets (Guillemot) unearths and honours the scarred bones of Romania’s postwar history. Tanatsei Gambura’s Things I Have Forgotten Before (Bad Betty) witnesses life in Zimbabwe beyond the country’s misgovernance. Alice Hiller’s bird of winter (Pavilion) was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets is a startling, vital book full of redactions and potent, painful imagery. Daniel Sluman’s single window, a memoir of life with chronic illness, is sharply honed; even the most harrowing details sing from the page as the reader is drawn into the poet and his wife’s small but extraordinarily rich world. Adam Horovitz’s latest book is Love & Other Fairy Tales (Indigo Dreams).

Kayo Chingonyi’s A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus) sings with bravery through vulnerability. Andrew McMillan looks towards a poetic future in pandemonium (Cape). Joelle Taylor proves her incredible talent across page and stage in C+nto & Othered Poems (Westbourne Press). Daniel Sluman’s single window (Nine Arches) also deserves an honourable mention. Aaron Kent is the founder and publisher of Broken Sleep Books.

Elizabeth Cook’s When I Kiss the Sky (Worple) is full of tender, memorable writing and some searing elegies. Paul Batchelor’s The Acts of Oblivion (Carcanet) contains beautifully turned poems of history, place and imagination. And it is a delight to read Kim Moore’s ingenious ‘All The Men’ poems in a single collection. Anna Woodford’s latest collection is Changing Room (Salt, 2018).

Suzannah V. Evans’s glittering pamphlet Brightwork (Guillemot) brims with playful joy for the names of things and sounds of objects. Jason AllenPaisant’s Thinking with Trees (Carcanet) powerfully exposes the connections between race and power in our public parks. Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream (Bloodaxe) is luminous and funny yet aching with painful secrets. Phoebe Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Carola Luther’s On the Way to Jerusalem Farm (Carcanet) is steeped in musicality, a hymn to nature and memory. single window by Daniel Sluman fuses memoir, poetry and photography in an illuminating exploration of disability, drugs, pain and love. The anthology of Roma women’s voices Wagtail, edited by Jo Clement (Butcher’s Dog), is compelling and vital. Ian Humphreys is the editor of Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press, 2021).

single window by Daniel Sluman is an exquisitely written, tempered and somehow bright porthole into disability and chronic pain. Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin) is an exceptional collection. lisa luxx’s Fetch Your Mother’s Heart (Out-Spoken) examines tenderness and violence during the 2019 Lebanese revolution, forging new mythologies and narratives. The vivid intensity of Hyena! Jackal! Dog! by Fran Lock (Pamenar) left me breathless. Joelle Taylor’s collection C+nto is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021. Kim Moore’s All The Men I Never Married (Seren) struck me from the march-song on the first page. Rude Mechanical by Jack Warren (Broken Sleep) is a pamphlet of affecting, rich pockets of tenderness. Finally, Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe (Faber) is wonderful. Georgie Evans, a bookseller at The Corner Bookshop, Halifax, is working on her first collection.

Annie Freud’s Hiddensee (Picador) is ambitious, deeply humane and generous. Jason Allen-Paisant’s astonishingly beautiful Thinking with Trees opened my eyes to how the legacy of slavery and colonialism has led to the need for Black futures in nature to be reimagined. Poet-scientist Sarah Watkinson’s Photovoltaic (Graft) is wonderful and inspirational, with great specificity of language and an irresistible enthusiasm. Poetry News competition judge Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright and translator. The beautiful bilingual English/Welsh Troeon: Turnings by Philip Gross, Cyril Jones and Valerie Coffin Price (Seren) navigates a fascinating borderland between translation and collaboration. Maria Stepanova’s War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe) is overpowering and disorientating. New Poetries VIII: An Anthology (Carcanet), edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, is excellent. Ben Ray’s The Kindness of the Eel is published by The Poetry Business.

POETRY NEWS

Shazea Quraishi’s Oulipian The Taxidermist (Verve) is clean and sculptural in form. The Cry of the Poor is a tender and radical anthology curated by Fran Lock (Culture Matters). Matthew Haigh’s recent pamphlet Vampires (Bad Betty) offers an effervescent new poetics. In Rocksong (Verve), Golnoosh Nour speaks a raging lyric that embraces vulnerability and a persistent curiosity. There’s an imagistic richness that is wholly compelling. Rushika Wick’s debut Afterlife As Trash was published by Verve in 2021. A Square of Sunlight by Meg Cox (Smith|Doorstop) is wry, witty and wonderful. Still by Christopher Meredith (Seren) has been a favourite for its natural calm and beauty; Penelope Shuttle’s Lyonesse (Bloodaxe) for its enchanting tales of a submerged land. Lesley Ingram won the Stanza Poetry Competition 2020 on the theme of ‘Hear’. Caleb Femi’s Poor is a book of actualisation, with superb attention to detail and well-balanced tension between lyric and narrative. Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe) expands the reader’s emotional palette through evocations of the natural world. The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser (Picador) makes you see the world differently. Nick Makoha won the Poetry London Prize 2021. Jenny Mitchell’s Map of a Plantation (Indigo Dreams) brings together a range of voices and innovative forms to take us deep into the vile trade and its reverberations. Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb (Chatto & Windus) is still sublime. Judi Sutherland’s Following Teisa (Book Mill), exploring the River Tees, is lyrical and evocative but acknowledges the grit of industry. Nicola Jackson was the Essay Prize winner in the Keats-Shelley Prize 2021. Sarah Westcott’s Bloom (Pavilion) offers room for uncertainty, the natural world’s complexity and the body’s encounters. Tiffany Atkinson’s Lumen (Bloodaxe) moves from an intense sequence on pain into joyful, sharp, smart poems. John Challis’s The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe) is rooted in relationships with family (often departed), with old trades and night trading. Jane Wilkinson won The Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2021. Return by Minor Road by Heidi Williamson (Bloodaxe) is a powerfully personal reckoning with the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Neil Elder’s Like This (4Word) charges everyday moments with lyricism and playfulness. Matthew Stewart creates unpredictable landscapes in The Knives of Villalejo (Eyewear), a book full of opposing currents and great emotional tension. Christopher James is a past winner of the National Poetry Competition. Karenjit Sandhu’s young girls! (87Press) and Maia Elsner’s Overrun by wild boars (flipped eye) are two excellent debuts from small presses. Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet) merges the everyday and the esoteric with humour and originality. Jen Hadfield’s The Stone Age (Picador) offers a closely observed, Shetland-rooted exploration of place and neurodiversity. Luke Thompson and Sarah Cave run Guillemot Press. The Kids by Hannah Lowe (Bloodaxe) reads like an unflinching labour of love. Kim Moore’s All The Men I Never Married is harrowing, direct and compassionate. I was immediately drawn into On Long Loan by Vanessa Lampert (Live Canon), which deftly narrates grief through the demolition of a power station. Carl Tomlinson’s Changing Places is published by Fair Acre Press. The sheer beauty of images and their juxtapositions in Kathleen Bell’s Disappearances (Shoestring) is breathtaking. Rosie Garland’s What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches) brings astrophysics, warzones, history and relationships into a dazzling whole. Caleb Parkin’s This Fruiting Body features startlingly vivid imagery, a queer ecopoetics and a Mother Earth who embraces and intertwines with technology. Pippa Hennessy is a bookseller at Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham. s To read the full-length versions of all our Poetry News contributors’ reading recommendations, visit bit.ly/poetrynewsrecommends

Members’ poems ‘Survival & Extinction’

Karen Jane Cannon I, Bee Thank you for purchasing your digi-bee pack with additional Smart Hive pod. Soon you will have the very best honey The queen has been fully digitalised and 3D modelled to 2.5cm (standard) or 3.5cm (super) and comprises an Intel Core microprocessor The operatives sweep the locale on pre-mapped routes For most efficient battery use, recharge after 10km You can remotely influence the direction of the operatives or pre-map a specific area via ordnance input on the free downloadable app The digi-bees will not react to most adverse weather conditions and are manufactured to our high specification from fully waterproof silicone All our digi-bees are fitted with Track & Trace technology If a digi-bee malfunctions, plug a sugar lead into the mains Upon rebooting, it will regain functionality Do not use non compatible chargers for risk of cross-viral contamination Operating instructions All our digi-bee products are pesticide friendly 2-speed, pollinator/gatherer settings The default setting is silent but you can choose traditional ‘teeing’ plus ten national anthems, a jazz quartet, fighter jets or other fun settings located on the accompanying handheld console Simply choose a ‘wild’ or ‘garden’ mode to decide your favoured honey – specify the habitat – heath, mountain, forest or bog and choose the appropriate season to optimise your honey production via Wi-Fi connectivity Precautions – if electric storms are forecast, please be aware your digi-bees may malfunction, in rare cases interfering with navigation. We suggest you lock down the Smart Hive to prevent swarming. However, if swarming occurs this product will self-navigate to a nearby tree or hedge Upon locating simply remove the queen’s battery The operatives should automatically go into sleep mode after 30 seconds allowing easy retrieval Read more winning poems in our ‘Survival & Extinction’ members’ poems competition, judged by Sujata Bhatt, on page 8.

STANZA POETRY NEWS

Split, melt, disappear Sarah Wimbush is this year’s Stanza Competition winner with her poem ‘Blood Sugar’

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hat a thrill to have my poem ‘Blood Sugar’ selected by judge Katrina Naomi! It means a great deal to me to win on behalf of my Stanza group, York Stanza. I’ve learned so much about poetry by listening, critiquing and receiving feedback among the many accomplished poets there, under the kind and direct supervision of Carole Bromley. ‘Blood Sugar’ never made it to a Stanza session, although I did share it with poets on a Lumb Bank Arvon course. It was a few lines longer and the consensus was ‘trim’. Thank you for that – you know who you are. As the poem states, I was deeply moved by Jenna Clake’s Bloodaxe collection, Museum of Ice Cream, a beautiful and yet aching exploration of eating disorders. In the past, these conditions were seen as a life choice, but thankfully society has developed a better understanding. Having navigated a sugar intolerance throughout my life I totally empathised with Clake’s portrayals of claustrophobic and challenging relationships with food. It wasn’t until after I’d written my poem that I discovered that the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’ is an actual thing: an American interactive play-experience for kids, punctuated with lashings of ice-cream – of course! Prose poetry seemed to be the perfect vehicle for a response to Clake’s collection. Some people regard the form as a leggy antithesis of what poetry should be, but to me it’s simply a different kind of poetry. Prose poetry allowed me to harness flow and intensity in order to build the necessary amount of emotion in the poem – although keeping those wild horses on track in a single sentence was definitely the biggest challenge. ‘Blood Sugar’ starts with simple choices, such as choosing to read a book. However, once the surface of the poem had been scratched by Museum of Ice Cream, I fuelled the pace of it with a stream of alarming images – the death of a friend, rotting fruit, a caged animal – as well as invasive words like stain, pith, scourer and scream to amplify the sense of powerlessness. Clake’s book cover, with its half a satsuma – which could be interpreted as representing exposed female genitalia, emphasising vulnerability – is noticeably at odds with the book’s title. I repeatedly used the image of the decaying satsuma to stress the narrator’s frustration, and reinforced that further with the homophonous “ice-cream”/“I SCREAM”. The dramatic final image of the ice-cream devouring the child’s hand leaves the reader wondering what next?

Goodbye, hello, much-missed

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Hurray and good luck to Claire Dyer (right), who has stepped down after five years as events curator at Poets’ Café, passing the microphone to Damon Young, Rika Banerjee, Zannah Kearns and Vic Pickup. The twenty-five-year-old Poets’ Café, now coordinated by Reading Stanza, is back live at its regular venue, South Street Arts Centre, on the second Friday of the month at 8pm, and online at 1pm on the third Friday of the month. For more details about Reading Stanza, which meets on the first Thursday of every month, contact Stanza rep Damon, damonyoung@btinternet.com Congratulations to York Stanza who sent lovely images of their

Sarah Wimbush Blood Sugar Dear Jenna. Even though I’m at that age where I’d rather forget birthdays, I was excited to receive Museum of Ice Cream as a gift from a friend who’d heard me mention it, you and I having been on that course together, where I realised that we have common ground on more than one subject, so I sat down to read it immediately because it was my birthday, and on your birthday you can do anything you like, well, almost anything that’s legal, like reading a book on a Saturday afternoon, even though you should be digging up weeds, or clearing out the fruit bowl, only to find myself instantly thrown by the missing dash in Ice Cream, and the fact that there was no picture of ice, or cream, or icecream on the cover, just half a satsuma with its exposed pith, and the more I thought about it, the more Ice Cream sounded like I SCREAM, but I carried on, because of the weird taste of any sweet-flavoured cream, iced or not, wanting to know how a seaside ‘treat’ could become an institution, hopeful that no one else had ever wondered about the weirdness too, and I read the collection twice, without breathing, from the first poem to the last simulation, each page melting between my fingers, not the kind of melt I’d experienced when my oldest friend disappeared before my eyes, and my heart split like the overripe orange I dropped on her cream carpet, that melt was different; me apologetic trying to dab it out, first unsuccessfully with a tissue, then scrubbing it with Persil on a scourer turning the stain brown, although by that point she didn’t care about the stain, or her overgrown garden, or her birthday – no, it was more the kind of melt you feel when you see a car shadowing a bike, or you can’t take your eyes off the single swaying elephant in a zoo, which reminds you of the 99 gripped in your hand as a child, you not knowing what to do with it, especially the flake, unable to throw it to the ground, not because it was a treat, or because the family lapped theirs up like whiskery old dogs, it was more the insidious sweetness of it, the slavering over your fist, the way it crawled down the stick of your arm, while minor planets dripped from your elbow onto the golden sand below in small black dots.

All a bit extreme, you might think, but that’s what the poem is about, how our bodies and minds play tricks on us and how isolating and overwhelming that can be. None of us decide to dislike the taste or texture of certain foods, be it Marmite, marmalade or mussels – it’s simply a part of who we are. The flip side of that is illustrated in Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream, where food becomes a tool; a way of being in control, a choice. s The 2021 Stanza competition was on the National Poetry Day theme of Choice – more information at bit.ly/stanzacomp21

“big reunion reading” in the new library at Hungate, York on National Poetry Day, 7 October. “There were sixteen of us reading and lots of us were meeting for the first time in person,” reports Carole Bromley. We are very sad to report the death of John Gohorry (below), longstanding Poetry Society member and a stalwart of Poetry ID (North Herts Stanza), in October. John worked, until his retirement in 2006, as a lecturer in further and higher education, and his poetry, short fiction and articles were widely published in journals, pamphlets and collections. Fellow Stanza member David Smith said, “John was a brilliant poet – thoughtful and precise in his writing, which he worked on daily. He rarely missed a Poetry ID meeting but for exceptional circumstances. He will be much missed.” Read more at bit.ly/johngohorry s

Illustration: Linda Hughes, lindahughesart.co.uk

POETRY NEWS

Trumpets, aspirin and the draft Many poets’ New Year’s resolution will be the perennial ‘write more!’. Tim Relf has gathered together expert tips from writers, editors and publishers to help you make the most of that endeavour

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Daljit Nagra ‘Keep a poem alive for as long as possible’ is one of my mantras. By assuming a poem is not finished, even after it’s appeared in a magazine, I can continue to play with it and hopefully find the very best version. This can involve many drafts over at least a year and it requires a great deal of confidence because the more we dismantle and rewrite a poem, the more we lose confidence in our ability to be a good writer. Remember, though, all writers make bad judgements in the editorial process so it’s worth saving a copy of early drafts to refer back to while you’re ‘keeping it alive’.

Kim Moore I once had a tutorial on a residential course with the late poet and writer Nigel Jenkins and he told me to approach my writing with the same discipline I’d used to learn to play trumpet – to read and write every day. I can’t say I’ve always stuck to it, but whenever I feel stuck in my own writing, or if I’m thinking too much about prizes or feeling envious of other people, I always remember what he said and return to reading – and that always makes me want to write again. Christopher Hamilton-Emery John Tranter told me to beware of the word ‘of ’. It crops up so often in tempting triune constructions like “blinding globes of dust”, “fickle chin of dawn”, “lord of small fates”. Once you spot them, you see them everywhere. And I’m addicted to writing them and need to weed them out of most of my own poems. Well, most of them. Rachael Allen Penelope Shuttle told me years ago not to worry about fads. Good work can take years to emerge and ‘cream rises’. This means you have to be patient and try to find your voice, not what you think is necessarily popular at any one point in time. It’s impossible not to think about publication, as that’s what so much ‘success’ seems to be predicated on, but Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (Faber) and poetry editor at Granta • Emily Berry is the editor of The Poetry Review. Her new collection Unexhausted Time is forthcoming in 2022 • Christopher Hamilton-Emery’s The Departure (2012) is published by Salt • John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems is published by The Gallery Press. He is Associate Publisher at Carcanet Press • Kim Moore’s latest book is All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) • Daljit Nagra’s British Museum is published by Faber • Helena Nelson’s new book Pearls, The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems is published by HappenStance.

it helps to approach writing as a kind of thinking practice (without the goal of publication in mind). If you see making poems as a lifelong way of thinking about – and articulating – the world and experiences, you’ll probably produce better work. Emily Berry Writing is really just about noticing. We make things up, but first of all we need to have noticed stuff. Frank O’Hara wrote in his poem ‘Today’: “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all / the stuff they’ve always talked about // still makes a poem a surprise!” If I want to write something but am not getting anywhere, I might go out for a walk and look at things, usually trees, but I would definitely look at kangaroos or aspirins if there were some there. And feel what it’s like to be out in the air. What is it like to be in the air? That’s my writing tip.

Helena Nelson Don’t send out fresh poems. I was told that over twenty years ago by Gerry Cambridge who founded The Dark Horse and it’s enduringly good advice. Often when you think you’ve finished a poem, you’re so full of enthusiasm that you immediately want someone to read it – but that person shouldn’t be an editor. Write it, wrestle with it then, when you think you’ve finished, put it away for at least three weeks before going back to it, as you need to be able to read it as if it’s not yours. Try changing it into an unfamiliar font as that can help you see it with fresh eyes. There’s a famous quote about poems never being finished, only abandoned, but I don’t think that’s strictly true. Some do feel finished. If you come back to it after three weeks, then three months, and it feels right, then it’s the time to send it out. John McAuliffe There’s a stage in the process when you need to be patient with a poem. Writing takes you to unexpected places, and you need to trust that. It can feel risky in this exploratory zone – exposing, fearful and foolish to be out there. That’s when I remember something Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021, RIP) told me: “Write as if you’re dead”. It’s a line that usefully and encouragingly Share your o wn floats into view at various points as I draft and inspirin g writing tip s re-draft poems. s with us on Tw itter at #PoetrySoci ety Tim Relf is working on his first collection. His most recent WritingTips novel, What She Left, is published by Penguin.

YOUNG POETRY NEWS Illustration: Andrew Rae

In brief

“where were you/when the seas /were warming?”

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Young poets’ news

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Tower Hamlets Slam On Thursday 4 October The Poetry Society’s Education Team headed to Tower Hamlets Library Service in East London, and ran a powerful slam led by Kat Francois. A huge thank you to Morpeth School and Central Foundation Girls’ School for taking part – we heard about everything from anti-racism to Subway orders, and are much the better for it. Thanks also to Stepney All Saints School who participated in the workshops.

Verve’s Young Poets Takeover We’re bringing the Young Poets Takeover to Birmingham! Young West Midlands poets Dale Booton, Aliyah Begum and Tom Rowe will be MCing and headlining this welcoming gig for young poetry lovers at all stages of their writing journeys. Poets aged 25 and younger can also sign up to the open mic by arriving early, and stay late for free refreshments and to meet other young poetry fans. The event is free, 11am12pm on Saturday 19 February 2022. Congratulations to... YPNer Yvanna Vien Tica and Foyle Young Poet Ahana Banerji, first and third in Ledbury Festival’s Young People’s Poetry Competition 2021 • YPNer Kaycee Hill, one of three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize 2021 • Foyle Young Poet Liv Goldreich and YPNers Maggie Wang and Fathima Zahra on their acceptance into the Poetry Translation Centre’s Undertow: Polylingual Poets scheme • Former SLAMbassador Kayo Chingonyi, Bloomsbury’s first poetry editor and shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, alongside Joelle Taylor, the founder of SLAMbassadors • Foyler Sung Cho, runner up in the Keats-Shelley Young Romantics Prize 2021. s

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oung poets Maggie Wang, Aliyah Begum, Daniel Clark, Renée Orleans-Lindsay and Mags Dixon took to the stage on Saturday 6 November, to read their poems at the UN Climate Conference wdfgsdglo Parvn. (COP26) in Glasgow. International young poets Jayant Kashyap, Brooke Nind, Sabrina Guo, Irma Kiss Barath and Yvanna Vien Tica appeared via video, along with Musicadadfnfoets children from Damers s First School in Dorset. We’re so grateful to People Need Nature for their support in this project. Read Daniel Clark’s diary chronicling his experience of the weekend on page 5, and watch the performance back at bit.ly/ypncop26 s

Renée Orleans-Lindsay, Maggie Wang and Aliy ah Begum at COP26

“Secrets to give”: 2021 Foyle winners announced

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e were delighted to announce the dazzling cohort of winners of the 2021 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award at a special online ceremony on National Poetry Day, 7 October. These 100 poets were chosen by Clare Pollard and Yomi S·ode from 14,408 poems by 6,775 poets aged 1117, from across the UK and 109 countries around the world. At the awards ceremony, we celebrated all 100 winners, and heard from the top 15 poets, the judges, and our two Foyle Patrons, award-winning writers and musicians Arlo Parks and Ben Bailey-Smith. The event was attended by a number of poetry stars, including the Poet Laureate himself, Simon Armitage! We’re delighted to share that our top 15 winners are: Ahana Banerji, Alex Dunton, Anja Livesey, Briancia Mullings, chenrui, Daniel Wale, Dhruti Halambi, Erin Hateley, Evie Alam, Giovanni Rose, Hollie Fovargue, Jenna Hunt, Lulu Marken, Sarisha Mehta and Ran Zhao. Several of these poets have been on the radio and even on TV talking about their writing already. Keep an eye out in the spring for the booklet of the top 15 winning poems, and the online anthology of the 85 commended poems. You can also find specially commissioned artwork by Thom Kofoed, responding to each of the 100 winning poems, on our website. Judges Clare Pollard and Yomi S·ode said: “After a period in which the burdens of the pandemic have often fallen so heavily on young people, we were moved by the Thom Kofoed’s limited edition print (detail) which features images from the 100 winning and commended poems

Featured poem Ran Zhao Get Up, We’re Going Home who told you to go crouch at the edge of the storm drain the whole night, feed handfuls of yourself to the rainwater? you’ve got a cold now, and your clothes are drenched from last night’s storm, and i have to climb down there and crawl in the mud after the bullfrogs, reach into each of their pale glowing moon-bellies and draw out the little giblets of your heart. come on, let me dry you off. let me walk you home in this red rain jacket i brought when i went looking for you at dawn. next time you’re on your own, okay? you know the rain is just water. it has no secrets to give. This poem is one of the top 15 winners in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2021. Read more of the top winners’ poems at bit.ly/foyleyoungpoets

beauty, fire and resilience of these poems. These poets write out of diverse backgrounds, landscapes and experiences, and this has translated into a rich variety of form and language. Here are poems about youth, gender, poverty, love, struggle, politics, culture, family. Poems brimming with rightful anger and hard-won hope.” Congratulations to all 100 winners, and to everyone who was inspired to write a poem and send it bravely into this year’s competition. We hope you keep writing, and we hope you enjoy reading the winning poems at bit.ly/foyleyoungpoets s

YOUNG POETRY NEWS

In brief Young poets’ news

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Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘The Fourth King’ is displayed on a banner around the tree in Trafalgar Square until 6 January 2022. Artwork by Marcus Walters, marcuswalters.com

Found above the breathing canopy

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very year since 2008, The Poetry Society has commissioned a new poem inspired by the gift of a Christmas tree from the City of Oslo to the people of London. The spruce is an annual thank you for keeping the Norwegian king safe during World War Two. We’re so pleased to share this year’s poem inspired by the tree: ‘The Fourth King’, by prize-winning poet Sinéad Morrissey. Alongside the poetry commission, we run poetry workshops in primary schools across Westminster. This year, we were delighted to send poets into St Mary of the Angels, Our Lady of Dolours, Gateway Academy and St Saviour’s CE Primary. Inspired by ‘The Fourth King’, the children wrote new poems, some of which are now published on The Poetry Society’s website. Three of the children also had the chance to perform ‘The Fourth King’ at the lighting-up ceremony of the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, in front of hundreds of

They found me high above the breathing canopy, tightjacketed prodigy – interstellar silence laced through my hair and frost like a tapestry nailed to my door. From Sinéad Morrissey’s ‘The Fourth King’

festive fans, on 2 December. Head to our website to read the poem, watch it brought to life, and subscribe to The Poetry Society’s podcast for a festive treat. If you’ll be in central London this Christmas, get up close to the Christmas tree to read ‘The Fourth King’ on a banner commissioned from Marcus Walters, which will adorn the spruce until 6 January 2022. s More details at bit.ly/thefourthking

We are all made of stars

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bout Us is a new project launched by The Poetry Society that explores the intersection between poetry and science. The central theme is how life across the universe is connected – we’re thinking about the way all life came from stars, how the cells in our bodies work together, the relationship between different organisms in the ecosystem, how humans are connected by art, language, and music, our shared responsibility towards the planet, and the way technology connects us today. We’re inviting young people aged 4-18 and based in the UK to send us their poems on this theme as part of a major new competition. Winners will have the chance to see their work featured in a huge touring live show – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in

Plath challenge Much-loved poet Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932. To mark what would have been her ninetieth birthday, poets Ian Humphreys and Sarah Corbett are putting together an anthology of responses to Plath’s work – and for her eighty-ninth birthday this year, we launched a new challenge to give you a chance to be in that anthology. Ian and Sarah offer prompts on two themes in Plath’s work: nature and magic. Find out more and be sure to send your entries ahead of the deadline of 3 January 2022, to bit.ly/plathchallenge

the biggest arts event in the last half a century. Enter online by 9 January at aboutus.earth/competition We’re also producing learning resources on these topics, featuring newly commissioned poems by some of your favourite poets. Check them out at aboutus.earth/resources s Jack Cooper’s ‘Micrographia, 1665’, featured above, is a new poem about the discovery of cells. Read the poem and an accompanying resource at bit.ly/MicrographiaPoem

Latest challenge winners Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s series of August challenges, set and judged by Foyle Young Poets Sinéad O’Reilly, Mukisa Verrall, Euan Sinclair and Anisha Minocha. We’re very pleased to share the winning poems – all thirty-two of them – on Young Poets Network. There you’ll find overheard conversations, surreal dental appointments, Python, Genshin Impact, old wooden pencil sharpeners, house plants, letters to eBay sellers and reCAPTCHA, and much, much more. Find all the latest poems by YPNers worldwide at ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/ your-poetry s

POETRY NEWS

Season 2 of podcast Planet Poetry has entered our orbit with another starry line up. Kim Addonizio joins hosts Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny for the season opener, followed by Ashanti Anderson and Martina Evans, with more stellar guests to follow! Tune in to the talking at planetpoetry.buzzsprout.com

Seen & Heard Catch up with some of the latest poetry stories on air and online

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Julia Donaldson’s ‘The Christmas Pine’, last year’s Trafalgar Square Christmas tree poem, has now been published as a charming festive picture book: bit.ly/donaldsonpine Warm congratulations to Kayo Chingonyi, SLAMbassador, Foyle judge, Forward and T.S. Eliot-shortlisted poet – and recently appointed as the editor of Bloomsbury Poetry. Kayo launches Bloomsbury’s firstever poetry list in 2022, with books by Valzhyna Mort, Polarbear, Anthony Joseph and Selina Nwulu. The tercentenary celebrations of master sculptor and woodcarver Grinling Gibbons included poetic tributes, including a new commission by Paul Munden and a new poem by PS member Oliver Comins. More at bit.ly/grinleygibbonspoem

Poets’ prizes

Public Sector Poetry is a writing project, journal and research project run by PS member Korrin SmithWhitehouse, with guest editors Molly Case and PS trustee Casey Bailey. Public Sector Poetry aims to champion creativity in the public sector and find new voices and a new audience for work about the lived experiences of those working in Education, Health and Social Care. The first issue of the journal will launch on 22 December, and each year there will be three online journals and a hardbound anthology. PSP will also be running workshops, performing at events, and running free creative and therapeutic workshops for public sector organisations in Northamptonshire. For more details visit publicsectorpoetry.co.uk

Congratulations to Alun Hughes, placed third in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize; the following were commended: Andrew George, Alexandra Corrin, Mark Fiddes, Cian Ferriter, Charlotte Cornell, Elena Croitoru, Robert Walton, Julian Bishop, Mary-Jane Holmes, Patrick Maddock, Christina Lloyd • Lesley Saunders won first prize in the Winchester Poetry Competition, with Laurie Bolger second and Paula Balfe third; Simon Maddrell was highly commend-

ed; Chrissy Banks, Sharon Black, Helen Bowell, Alexandra CorrinTachibana and Jo Davis were commended • Sarah Mnatzaganian won first prize in the Spelt Poetry Competition, with Rachel Davies second and Diana Cant third. Carole Bromley, Patricia Leighton, Jules Whiting and Mark Fiddes received special mentions • Jenny Mitchell won the Gloucestershire Poetry Society Summer 2021 Poetry Competition, Sophie Dumont was second, Scott Elder third and Caroline Hammond was highly commended • Jenny Mitchell, Fiona Perry and Kathy Miles came first, second and third in the Poetry Book Awards; Harry Gallagher was shortlisted, and Mark Fiddes, Lawrence Illsley, Alex Josephy and Antony Mair were longlisted • Tim Cresswell and Gregory Leadbetter were longlisted in the Laurel Prize • Zach Horan is longlisted

Poetry News is published quarterly by The Poetry Society, 22 Betterton Street, London WC2H 9BX, UK. Editor: Mike Sims, tel: 020 7420 9880 or email: msims@poetrysociety.org.uk

Thanks to Rachel Piercey for her invaluable assistance. The views expressed in Poetry News are not necessarily those of The Poetry Society. ISSN 1353 7237.

Poetry Society members’ recent successes

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Poetry Goes to the Movies is a new podcast series which looks at poets who made films, films about poets, and whether Hollywood blockbusters can shed light on timeless poetic concerns such as identity, influence, and how to decode the meaning of a poem. Poet Adam O. Davis and film fan Colin Waters host. poetrygoestothemovies.weebly.com Krisztina Tóth is the latest poet to delve Behind the Poem in our regular online feature, musing on the existential contradictions behind her poem ‘Time, Time, Time’. And we also go In Front of the Poem, most recently with Seán Hewitt exploring Romeo Oriogun’s ‘From Darkness Into Light’, which “unfolds like a galaxy from its originary blast”, and with Christopher DeWeese reading Dominic Leonard’s ‘Eclogue’ and admiring its startling language. poetrysociety.org.uk/thepoetryreview

in the Frontier Poetry Digital Chapbook Contest • Tim Relf won second prize in the McLennan Poetry Competition • Niki Strange won second prize in the Second Light Competition; Hilary Hares, Kaye Lee, Patricia Leighton, Belinda Singleton, Rachel Spence, Nicola Warwick and Veronica Zundel were commended; Denise Bennett, Jenny Pagdin, Sue Proffitt, Mary Robinson and Belinda Singleton were shortlisted • Emma Simon was the winner of the York Poetry Prize, with Kathryn Bevis second and Michael Farren fourth; Sharon Black won the International Commended Award; Yvie Holder won the Helen Cadbury Prize; Emma Simon, Michael Farren, Sara Levy, Susan Szekely, Olga Dermott-Bond, Joanne Key, Di Slaney and Simon Currie were highly commended; Maeve Henry, Rachel Davies and Amelia Loulli were commended

As outgoing artistic director of Winchester Poetry Festival, Sasha Dugdale was presented with a commemorative slice of Cumbrian slate carved by Pip Hall. In a nod to Sasha’s long engagement with Russia and its literature, the slate reads, “But best of all the silver willow tree” – the willow symbolises Russia. Sasha was so thrilled with the present that she immediately embarked on a new translation of the poem. Actor Ruth Sillers has collaborated on a richly textured project with musician Jane Harris, weaving together poetry and prose in response to Jane’s song ‘Layer Upon Layer of Memories’. Listen at bit.ly/layerlayermemories Rapturous ruptures, bad, mad and bold choices – the latest mixtapes from Anita Pati, Clare Pollard and Naush Sabah are chock full of treats for the eye, ear and mind. More at poetrysociety.org.uk/mixtape Black History Month was marked by Poems on the Underground with posters featuring poems by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Benjamin Zephaniah, Roger Robinson, Nii Ayikwei Parkes, Nick Makoha, Patience Agbabi, Grace Nichols and many more. Read the pamphlet at bit.ly/BHMpotu s

• Kate Young won third prize in the Federation of Writers (Scotland) Vernal Equinox Competition, with Pete Russell, Marianne MacRae, Lydia Harris, Mairi Jack, Anne Ballard and Rod Whitworth commended • Jane McKie was the winner of the Wigtown Poetry Prize. The Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize winner was Basil du Toit • Amelia Loulli was second in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition; Sarah Davies, Sara Levy, Laurie Bolger and Caroline Bracken were commended; Freya Leech, Evie Alam and Kirsten Allen were commended in the Young Poets category; Cat Turhan won the Adult Local Prize; Hannah Chutzpah and Jack Andrew Lenton were commended • Sarah Hemings was first in the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network Poetry Competition; Josephine Lay and Kathryn Southworth were highly commended s The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) promotes environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests. By buying products with an FSC label you are supporting the growth of responsible forest management worldwide. Poetry News is printed with vegetable-based inks. Plates, surplus inks and printing blankets are recycled.