Conception

A winter night, his mouth on her breast
so soft the spring inside her wound tight
following the trail of it, his breath
whispering she should open up, not fight,
and she did, darling. She was one long
ache, hard to see where she ended
and he began. Then such strong
aching, hard to see where she ends
and the baby began. They become one long
whisper, opening up without a fight,
losing the trail of themselves, breath
so real the spring inside winds tight
feeling the shock of what’s happening
this spring night, new mouth on her breast.

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Sarah Salway is the current Canterbury Laureate. She is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories. Her poems have won significant prizes in competitions organized by Poetry London, the Essex Poetry Festival and The New Writer, and have appeared in publications including the Financial Times, the Virago Book of Shopping, Mslexia, Pen International and Poetry London. Visit her website

Sarah’s collection You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book is available now from Pindrop Press. See Sarah at the Phoenix Club, Charing Cross Road on March 8th 2012 for the launch.

Norwich, Midnight

Sensing somehow earthquake or fire
creatures scurry through Mousehold Heath.
The moon snags on the cathedral’s spire
as we walk home down Magdalen Street;

through the inner ring road underpass
the piss-yellow glow of the Oxfam shop,
in whose doorway we stop and kiss
kebabs in hand, with greasy chops.

Anglia Square has never looked so beautiful
littered as she is with burger boxes.
Praise the Lord and the City Council
down from the Heath come the urban foxes.

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Martin Figura lives in Norwich with the poet Helen Ivory.  His work ranges from the bitingly funny of his Boring The Arse off Young People to the dark subject matter of his Ted Hughes Award shortlisted collection and one-man-show Whistle.   He won the 2010 Hamish Canham Prize and has performed from New York to Cromer and is an Apples & Snakes Associated Artist.   His photography’s been widely published and exhibited, including at the National Portrait Gallery.  He runs the Café Writers live literature series in Norwich and is a founder member of Norwich Poetry Club.

www.martinfigura.co.uk

Moon Landing

Your belly is rounded, palimpsest of moon.
Feet-up, you wait, eyes scanning the flickering screen.

The grainy transmissions are like the silvered crater
of my skull, the muffled chambers of my heart.

Through egg-shell skin, I see
a hazy light, turn like a heliotrope.

As he takes his momentous step, you feel
me kick. We're almost weightless, he and I,

suspended between worlds. But I resist
the pull of earth, the first breathless glimpse,

begin one last slow-motion somersault,
not yet ready to breathe for myself.

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Born in 1969, Karen Dennison’s passion for poetry began in her early thirties. Her poems have been published in South, Orbis, The New Writer, Ink Sweat and Tears and poetrywivenhoe 2011. Karen won the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition in 2011 and her first collection, Counting Rain, is published by Indigo Dreams.

how does

fragrance of sleep drift

this easily through

rooms– as though

your resting had keys to

every chamber whose

open doors i

cannot step

through– i lie

alert & breathe spare

room breath & in

my casing

form you   warm &

close   who slumber

farther from sense than

how would i

know?– perhaps that

shape a world might

have or

a home

if it woke from sleep &

walked

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Ecologist, PhD physicist and Royal Literary Fund Fellow Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning writer and residency frontiersman, the only poet to have held residencies at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. “Reminiscent of e.e. cummings at his best”, his work is “vivid, generous and life-affirming” (Envoi). Whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl or immersing himself in heartfelt invention,Petrucci aspires to “Poetry on a geological scale” (Verse). He is four times winner of the London Writers competition and three times winner of a Sheffield Thursday Poetry Prize. He has won prizes in the National Poetry Competition, is recipient of a PBS Recommendation, and holds the Bridport Prize, the Frogmore Prize, a Silver Wyvern Award, the Irish Times Perpetual Trophy, the Essex Book of the Year (Fiction) Prize (2000-2002), the 1995 and 1996 Edith Kitt Memorial Awards, an Arts Council England Writers’ Award and a New London Writers Award. Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl(Enitharmon, 2004) secured the Daily Telegraph/ Arvon Prize and “inflicts… the finest sort of shock, not just to the senses, but to the conscience, to the soul” (Poetry London). It is the basis of a celebrated film by Seventh Art Productions. i tulips (Enitharmon, 2010) takes its name from Petrucci’s vast Anglo-American sequence, of which the waltz in my blood (Waterloo, 2011) is also a part. Now on target to reach 1111 poems, these “modernist marvels” (Poetry Book Society) embrace contemporary issues of searing social, linguistic and personal relevance via Petrucci’s distinctive combination of innovation and humanity. www.mariopetrucci.com

The pleasure of walking with someone
you don’t know well
but come to know better, one stride
matching itself to the other, finding a way of progressing
despite this weather. Snippets of talk
snatched away by the wind
or stalled for an instant and hanging
outspread like the buzzard whose two-foot wingspan
governs the entire valley, drops
in a rush of silence
on something small, but important.

The paths you push
where paths never were,
transient as sheeptrails, ponytracks
running parallel, drawing together, apart,
the rough heather springing up behind
but never completely; so that anyone coming after
might gather the snags of conversation
as you climb higher, into the clear
domain of ravens, a dolmen, sudden
lush emerald rings of grass
where something human must have been.

And the wind blows so strongly
when you stand on the Tor
that you can hardly stay upright.
It rips through your cagoule
and the sound is the sound of a kite
that someone is trying to fly
or the sail of a dinghy
years ago, in a Sussex harbour
shuddering, testing the air
before it filled and the perfect silence happened.

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Caroline Price grew up in Sussex and Suffolk. She studied Music at York University and the Guildhall School of Music in London and has worked as a violinist and teacher in Glasgow, London and Kent, where she now lives. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in a wide number of magazines and anthologies over the years, and her interest in the French language and culture have led to readings and writing residencies across the Channel. In 1997 she represented Kent in a tour of Northern Europe by women poets from Kent, Ireland, France, Belgium and Flanders, and more recently she co-edited, with Myra Schneider, an anthology of poetry by women poets: Four caves of the Heart (Second Light Publications, 2004). She has published three collections of poetry, Thinking of the Bull Dancers (Littlewood Press, 1987), Pictures against Skin (Rockingham Press, 1994) and Wishbone (Shoestring Press, 2008).

Exhibit ‘A’

The McGillivray barn
before the family murders:
To the right you can make out
the timbered stalls, the chaff
scattered across the stone floor
and at the far end
the open double doors;

then, you may notice
the recycled iron hooks hammered
into the central crossbeam.
Six of them, newly installed
by the blacksmith who carried out
the instruction insisting
with a shake of his head
they were mounted too high
for halters and bridles.

You won’t hear the children’s
laughter as they clamber over
the combine harvester in the yard
or see Sissy McGillivray, framed
in the kitchen door on baking day,
wipe her hands on her apron,
call them in for lemonade.

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Michelle McGrane lives in Johannesburg and blogs at Peony Moon. Her collection The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa.

The Thousand Natural Shocks is the fourth collection from multi-award winning poet and playwright Char March. It has already won The Purple Patch Award and The PoetryKit Award.

Visit her site

Her poems have enormous strength and force, her wordplay is intelligent; she often surprises by finishing with a wry twist.

In I never forget my toothbrush, for example, the poem begins:

“She squeezes the tube/but I do the rest myself”

and ends

“I champ and froth, and imagine myself rising/over the last fence at the Grand National/ahead by three lengths/and no need for a bloody jockey.”

I found a number of the poems in this collection quite astonishing and at the same time tender. March’s opening poem Another box of nipples arrived today tells of a woman in “the bloat of chemo”, but the poet doesn’t see “hacked-at womanhood,/that you’ve sobbed salt-herring barrels for”; she sees the woman who’s mending pullovers as “Darning her way to normality”. It reminds me of Clare Best at her finest (her poem Stitch was in TNW Autumn issue).

It is quite startling then to discover within the collection not just Oor Wullie, The Broons and Rab C Nesbitt in the poem 97 ways to be Scots but also illegal aliens with two IMAX ticket stubs and a Postman Pat hummer.

It’s a first rate collection that gets under your skin, makes it prickle as the hairs stand on end. My favourite lines are from Learning the ropes:

“Today I sit huddled/and sobbing/on the hearth rug in/The Quiet Room”… “Last week I caught myself rocking/backwards and forwards/in my chair,/moaning/ – just like a real nutter.”

…time and space, and the dexterity to make extra days happen when the Calendar won’t budge.                 Helen Ivory

….good health and happiness for my family, and some sales of my just published (Shoestring Press) collection of short stories; ‘Sing to Me’. As my eightieth birthday is nigh, it may well be my final offering!                 Derrick Buttress

….a kinder and less divided world in 2012.                    Catherine Smith

… a new government.                 Vicky Wilson

… to have the idea for a perfect poem on every one of the twelve days! Is this going to be like the joke where everyone asks for world peace except me?                 Jo Hemmant

…. some glowing winter days, to spot the dark fur of the roe deer and the blush on the undersides of squawky redwings and, in the long darkness, to see the glittering of stars and then to come inside to a log-fire burning in the grate with my far-flung family sitting safely beside me.                Rebecca Gethin

… is an end to violence against women (and a decent bottle of fino                              wouldn’t go amiss).              Katrina Naomi

… is the pleasure of once more believing that a new start will solve everything, next time round. Or if you’d accept a sentence that doesn’t begin that way:

In Częstochowa, Poland, the home of the Black Madonna, a donkey that lives in a creche in the monastery grounds, year-round, is always really happy when he’s joined at Christmastime by companiable cows and sheep.                     Caroline Carver

…. a merry Christmas for everyone – may we marvel in as many ways as we can, and find as many ways as possible to share our marveling with each other.               Elly Nobbs

…is a season ticket for the Group of Seven - autumn, winter, spring and summer.                Stephen Boyce

… peace effervescent as pink champagne; tolerance wrapped in tender-hearted tissue and time to slow down.                Tina Cole

… silence and great music to play into the silence… and a Christmas Eve that slows right down, so I can go on and on anticipating…      Clare Best

… a new mayor in Toronto. And some snow; a white Christmas would be nice for a change.                Ayesha Chatterjee

… FOR ‘GIRL POWER’ TO MEAN MORE THAN THE CHANCE TO SELL EXPENSIVE CLOTHES. Oh, and world peace and a new Ipad.                  Sarah Salway

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS….

you,
all of you,
less now than
we were, maybe soon less again,
a day will come when other calls than
coming home to here will be important – there
will be others with whom you’ll share this day and
this home too, may not be here, further on who knows? for now
I raise my glass, pause, remember, enjoy, look forward with all of you,
you

Emer Gillespie

… Grace by Esther Morgan, inspiration for some wintery poems and a large measure of sanity.                Melissa Lee-Houghton

September

This is unknown;
my bright, berry blood comes late,
follows a new calendar.

Soon, I’ll say goodbye
to this belching red,
this faint anaemia, goodbye

to the children
I never wanted. Last night,
walking back from the village,

I saw them in the waning moon,
holding hands, running
away from me.

(Commended in the Poetry Society’s 2011 Stanza Competition)

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Katrina Naomi’s first full collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake was shortlisted for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and received an Arts Council England writer’s award. Her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle  won the 2008 Templar Poetry Competition. In 2009-10, Katrina was the first writer-in-residence at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, W Yorks. A collection of her Bronte-themed poems Charlotte Bronte’s Corset was published in 2010 by the Bronte Society. Katrina is working towards a new collection while studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. She is originally from Margate and lives in south London. Visit Katrina’s site.

After Tarkovsky

A karner butterfly,
climbing the stairwell
of late evening,

through the shadows
cast by larches, up
into the last colour

this sun can give; how
it holds the pages
of its black-edged wings,

unreadable. At night,
I take a leather book,
switch off the lamp

and open it. So dark,
I barely even see
the white. It’s then

I settle on the bed.
It’s then I read
just what I like.

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Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985 and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, ‘the shape of every box’ and ‘a pint for the ghost’ (a PBS Choice). Her first full collection is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus. Helen received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer prize in 2008. From 2010-2011 she was Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere where she published ‘Lie of the Land’, a pamphlet of poems written during her residency. She is currently working towards a PhD at Sheffield University.