This episode features an interview with Northern Ireland poet, Matthew Rice, where he talks about his jurney in poetry and gives a short reading of his work. Most of the poems come from his forthcoming collection which deals with the experience of shift work in a factory. Matthew's presentation of blue collar industrial work from the inside is fairly unusual in poetry, and this insider's view accords well with the theme of inside / outside which was the prompt for this episode. It was chosen to give poets plenty of latitude and this is reflected in the variety and wealth of poems received. Poets in this episode include Alison Jones, John White, Helen Overell, Clare Starling, Pat Winslow, Jane Thomas, Susan Thomas, Guy Jones, Polly Walshe, Maureen Jivani, Julia Webb, John Daniel, Diana Bell, Lizzie Ballagher, Stephen Claughton and Lucy Ingrams.
Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull (US). You can read some of his new work in The Poetry Review, Spring 2024. |
Alison Jones
Felis Silvestris (Captive)
Wildcat in the zoo,
muscles along the metal perimeter
of a gift, named enclosure.
We will preserve
what we are losing,
and keep it here for everyone.
I have paid to see a species in mourning,
narrated as too dangerous to be free,
while the monsters roam beyond the fence.
Cat I must not touch,
though her banded body and club tail
ghost me to the cat who prowls my kitchen.
When will we stop believing we are saving what is gone?
The sleight of hand, glittering coins pulled from earth and air,
the fearless fight for territory, the death kiss of dagger teeth.
Her pacing is relentless,
like a prisoner circling a barren yard, or
a friend's ex-boyfriend, who worked on the rigs,
and ran round the helipad every day,
like a vulnerable trapped rodent.
Her origami eye folds in forest memories,
diminishing auroch, tarpan, brown bear to fine amber tissue,
as a paper sign sings wild she has never known.
Alison Jones' work has been widely published in journals such Poetry Ireland Review, Proletarian Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Green Parent Magazine and The Guardian. Her pamphlets, Heartwood (2018) and Omega (2020) were published by Indigo Dreams. She is working on a full collection, and an interdisciplinary project bringing together poetry, music, art and film. |
John White
At Ballyrolly Farmhouse
‘The farm was my country ….’ (Robert Sugar, child resident at the Millisle Kinderfarm.)
Escaped from the Kristallnacht,
they pitched up near tracts of patched airfields
and bevelled hedges, wind to skin you,
a clapped farmhouse where they stood
the damaged flax back in better days.
Names like Sugar, Jakobi
are strange, yet they seem also strangers
to each other, learning English at
the half-Scots school in tidy
columns, psalms flung from chests that burgeon.
Two Clydesdales, a Ferguson
tractor, bring barley, beet, potatoes.
Mentor, Erwin, plays the saxophone.
A pitstop between Millisle
and Carrodore becomes their cosmos.
The peninsula unbends –
on serrated shorelines, waders root
for something intact. There’s Newsreel shows
in town. What they take, they take
in fragments, grit their teeth hard, crack on.
A native of County Derry, John White lives now in Oxfordshire, where he works in a special school. Published widely, including the Oxford Poets series (Carcanet), he was commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry and the Magma Poetry Prize (2024). His debut pamphlet, ‘Attachments’, won the 2023 iOTA Shots competition, and was published in June 2024 by Templar Poetry. |
Helen Overell
Filling Factory — Number 5 team
Number 1 team worked with high explosives
Called up at start of war, just seventeen, set to work in munitions — packing shells;
whole team searched once through those gates
and again after changing — no kirby grips allowed, nothing metal, although wedding
rings, if any, could be kept on and taped over. Worst bit were fitting lids — felt awful
first time, came over all faint, girl showing me what to do and not do, looked at me, face drained pale, skin clemmed, walked me outside into fresh air — just enough solder
needed, and only on rim, too much and shell failed.
Best part were filling crates, being asked to tuck in all those letters,
begged I know I sent one this morning but can you put another in for me
this afternoon? Love notes going to and fro to men at airfield — total strangers they
were — taking a risk against all the odds; You don't know anything about him — says he's
not married? They all say that, love. Mind you, there were at least one marriage came
about and still going strong —
he were a tall, dark, handsome Scot and she were but a slip of a girl, a right Yorkshire
lass — both old and gray now.
The relief at end of shift, stood in line, patted about, Who knows why — who'd have
wanted owt o' that? Hurried along, shedding those overalls caked with powder, larking about with not a lot on, stepping over barrier onto clean side and into own clothes,
tidying and pinning up hair ready for civvy street before yet another search What on
earth could they have been looking for? Then freedom of sorts — hands, face yellow —
No amount of washing would shift that, awful if you were asked to a wedding ... factory
canaries for the duration.
Helen Overell has work in several magazines and some of her poems were highly commended or placed in competitions including the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2018 and the Poetry News Members' poems Summer 2020. Her first collection Inscapes & Horizons was published by St Albert's Press in 2008 and her second collection Thumbprints was published by Oversteps in 2015. A booklet of her poems Measures for lute was published by The Lute Society in 2020. She takes an active role in Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society Stanza group. |
Clare Starling
Bee On The Tube
Thirty metres down
below Green Park,
in bloomless gloom
it draws its loops tighter,
smacks against
scratched glass,
sideswipes the shuffling
beggar who now starts
to loudly shout Sorry
to bother you Ladies and Gentlemen -
Bee’s mad buzz blends
with the tunnel’s empty shriek,
while, crammed in tight,
ranks of the flower-free
give a blind flinch,
eyes fixed on small screens,
each the sad protagonist
of a half-reflected story.
A hundred animals
in a transportation device -
no one, except the wild-
eyed supplicant
who flails his arms
like a storm-blasted tree
is of a mind to heed
the spiralling bee.
Clare Starling started writing poetry when her son was diagnosed with autism during lockdown. Her pamphlet Magpie’s Nest won the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award 2023. She particularly loves writing about our connection with nature, and about how neurodiversity can give different perspectives on the world. |
Pat Winslow
The Cracks Are Showing
Those hard-to-reach places aren’t cleaned any more:
limescale crusts the sinks and shower, the toilet bowl
is scratched and yellow. Windows rattle, doors squeal,
the chimney leaks. There’s food on the dining room floor.
Pale cobwebs hammock the garage shelves and walls.
Tins of paint that will never be used again are stacked
three-high, seams rotting, their hammered lids stuck.
Rust creeps along pitted screwdrivers and tenon saws.
Carpet tacks and nails turn to dust in cardboard trays.
Light bulbs go unchanged. The house begins to darken.
Each time you visit there’s some new corner to brighten.
The shine, the gift you bring with you each time, takes days
to restore. You need a proper scouring more and more,
something like the sea to leave you scrubbed and raw.
Pat Winslow has published seven collections, most recently, Kissing Bones with Templar Poetry. A winner of several notable competitions over the years, she enjoys commissioned collaborations with film-makers, composers and artists. She is about to direct a community opera.
|
Jane Thomas
Your Front Door
[The frame and limit of your world, locked in
and locked out, sentry alarms on both sides]
Pane of mottled glass
[conjures spectres of all who call]
Silver letterbox sealed
[communications long redirected]
Draft excluder
[sleeping serpent eating its own tail]
You want to go home but you're already here.
Jane Thomas writes about health, inequalities, and interbeing. She serves as a trustee at The National Centre for Creative Health. And has been highly commended in The Bridport, Fish, Live Canon, Hippocrates. Her recent works have been published in Stand, Mslexia, The Rialto and The Oxford Review of Books. She has received support from, The Arts Council England and The Society of Authors, this autumn she will participate in Eurotas Creative Bridges, Masters Series and PEN International Congress. |
Susan Thomas
OUTSIDE
You say you want to die outside.
I think this is a first
although I do recall long ago
a patient in their bed in the courtyard
dappled by the afternoon trees,
the leaves tinkling like milk-bottle tops
slipping away while they slept.
It was hard to notice, the lack of rise
from their chest, the gentle absence
of breath – replaced by birdsong,
but placing a hand on their shoulder
they could not be woken - it was pretty much perfect.
Now we discuss what we will do if it rains, if it is night,
if the wind blows or the sun screams down
where we will plug in the bed?
Maintenance is called.
A gazebo is erected.
These days it is difficult to connect to the stars,
but we circumnavigate the cosmos
try and get you there, respond to the
primordial pull rather than protocols.
We open the doors, and let the curtains
billow like rolling waves
feel the chill rise of goose skin on our
sleeveless arms, laugh with you as we
wheel your bed over the doorframe bump
into the garden, bringing you closer
to the earth.
Susan Thomas is a senior staff nurse in a hospice which often inspires her poetry. She has won the Elmbridge Prize, Arts University of Bournemouth Prize, was longlisted for National Poetry Competition 2022. She was commended for the Hippocrates Prize in 2021 and 2024 and won the Hippocrates Prize in 2022. Her work has been part of a Surrey art exhibition created by Whistlestop Arts on the subject of death and dying - Shrouded In Silence. |
Guy Jones
The Man Outside
The man outside my house
is a long way from home
He showed me a picture on his phone once
There was a a large table leaden with dishes
bread
vegetables
fruit
and jugs of fresh
clean
spring water
beyond the table
on a dry paddock
chickens roamed
and waited for the arrival
of brothers and sisters
giggling children
and the chattering of family
that is everything
The man in the car outside my house
is a long way from home
I know
because he told me once
how his mother was the candle of the house
a light that was everything
that never went out
and how his father broke the bread
at the head of the table and listened to the news
that his sons and daughters brought
from all four corners
of his world
The man who sleeps in the car outside my house
is a long way from home
I know because he painted me an image
of how beautiful his country was
before the bombs fell
and he had to dig his son out of the rubble
before they starting carrying guns
and bullying on the streets
before people disappeared
and they raped
He left with his wife and children
when the guns pointed at his head
and they strung him up for days
in a dark place
They washed up on this shore
where his marriage broke on the rocks
of thoughts that will not stop
of gun points
and anger
and fear
The Man in the car outside my house
lies awake
on a borrowed inflatable mattress
drinking begged for coffee
waiting for the slow cogs of helpfulness
in a distant land
to turn
straining the internet
for news
of brothers and sisters
and whether father still breaks bread
and if a candle still burns \
in his long away home.
Guy Jones is the Writer In Residence for Hothouse Theatre, a community theatre, audio and film project in Nottingham. He has written several fringe style plays and short films for Hothouse.
He is also the editor of Oh My Nottz, an online magazine which is used as a focus for the creativity of young people. Oh My Nottz includes Writer’s Block pages which support and promotes written work, workshops and events from Nottinghamshire and beyond.
He performs his poems on the Nottingham Poetry scenes and is an active member of DIY Poets.
|
Polly Walshe
Blink
What is there to be said
Of the woman with nowhere to live
Except that she appears
If you forget to blink
Looking red in the face and raw
With a pizza crust in her hand
Picked up from the street?
If you give her a note or a coin
Won’t it make her more keen
To step into the land
Between your blinks
Posing a question you can’t stand?
Her skin, you think,
How did it get so lined?
After how many hours
Of cold and sun and wind
Did she start to look so bad?
Aren’t there services for people like her?
Why didn’t she look for help
Or simply take more care?
How is it your fault
If she doesn’t fit,
And won’t follow the rules?
How are you the culprit in this?
You can only get on with your life
And leave her to hers
Which – from what people say –
She may well prefer.
Polly Walshe is a poet and painter. In recent years her poems have appeared in magazines including Acumen, Pennine Platform, PN Review, The London Magazine, 14 Magazine, Shearsman and The Spectator. Her poems have been longlisted three times in the National Poetry Competition. In 2019 a selection of her poems featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in the exhibition Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery in New York City. In the same year she won the Frogmore Prize. This year, 2024, her poem Holiday Rental appeared in the Candlestick Press anthology Wish You Were Here. Her novel The Latecomer was published by Random House in 1997 and won a Betty Trask Award. |
Maureen Jivani
Alma is a God in Ruins
After Johnny Vegas’s Broken Angel
Barely dressed, and cold,
on a bench outside the Blue Angel
Alma examines her dislocated wing:
featherlight and swept across her knees,
it is structurally sound, no broken
quills or shafts, no shattered barbs
or barbules. All hooks intact.
Its feathers, softer, purer than a child’s
first laugh. Its scent is snow.
What then are we to make of this:
her inability to part the heavy air and soar,
to reach her Paradise.
Which beast convinced her
of such brokenness,
cast her down, afraid to fly?
Maureen Jivani’s recent poetry can be found in Alba, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Orbis, The Friday Poem, Scintilla, and Under the Radar. Her first collection Insensible Heart was published by Mulfran Press. She is currently finalising her second collection Alma and the Blue Slide. |
Julia Webb
A woman’s hair is trailing through the mud
the river is flowing past her head
the moon shines placidly above
a light drizzle begins to fall
the evening is as black as soot or coal
her head is pillowed on the grass
her face already wet so that at first
she doesn’t notice the drizzle fall
her dress is ripped and a button has come off
the river is quiet
but flows insistently past
she wonders where ducks go at night
she wonders if she should try and stand up
the grass is soft and wet beneath her head
water keeps falling from the sky
it pools at the corners of her eyes
but she doesn’t move
the rain is cool and gentle
it doesn’t hurt at all
the person she thought was her friend has gone
there’s just the rain
the river the grass the mud
The sea wasn’t getting any closer
I was holding the road in my mind
but the road was moving
or I was moving
I couldn’t tell any more
I was no longer relevant
words snaked out of my mouth
it was we the whole way
we were in the car
the car was a live thing
we followed its will
we were all around the houses
we were up and down and sideways
we were in between
we were falling down
the humid cracks of the day
rolling away in the gutter like hot coins
you asked me if this was the right way
and I knew I should know the answer
but my head was full of song lyrics
they spooled out across my mind
I was a camera filming blindly
not taking anything in
the light was spilling everywhere
it made the trees divine
Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer and artist from a working class background. She has an MA in Poetry from the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The Forward Book of Poetry (2017, 2023). She has three collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016) Threat (2019) and The Telling (2022). She lives in Norwich where she runs real world and email poetry courses, mentors for The Writing Coach and is an editor for 'Lighthouse' - a journal for new writers. Her fourth collection Grey Time will be published in 2025. |
John Daniel
Anniversary gift
You bought me a pear tree -
Conference, with sweet flavour
but the bushes around it grew faster,
hiding your gift in thick shrubbery
year after married year,
the pear tree persisted,
breaking through thick-leafed invaders,
proffering a limb to the sunlight
like an arm pushed through a letter-box,
bright oval leaves appearing
surviving my gardening skills,
the darkness of fir and laburnum,
hostile brambles and ivy,
a gift from the tangled thicket of love
with white blossom in May,
a pear, a wedding bouquet.
John Daniel is one of a number of Modern Poets in a Faber anthology Introduction One and has had poems published in Rialto, The Journal, Smiths Knoll, Fourteen, Orbis, The Interpreter’s House, North Stone Review. He has published four collections of poetry, Skinning the Bull and Lighting the Fire (Oversteps), Missing the Boat (Etruscan Press) and Pushing 100 (Pennycomequick)about caring for an aged mother. He has also won several poetry prizes including the Camden Poetry competition. Exeter poetry competition and Kent and Sussex competition. He has read his work at festivals including Ways with Words and the South Bank. |
Diana Bell
Full Moon Night
I step outside.
There is a tightness in the air -
clouds are moving fast across the sky,
the moon has a halo
and no birds sing.
A deer steps lightly through the trees;
The fox knows this is a good night
to take the unwary.
And what do I know?
That the earth is a sphere in space,
that there are seven billion humans on the planet,
that the moon is three hundred thousand miles away,
that there are eight planets in the solar system,
that we are part of a galaxy,
that there are a hundred billion galaxies.
I breathe deeply
and go back inside
where music is playing.
Diana Bell is a multi-media visual artist including sculpture, installation and painting. She has won awards for her sculpture and for her work in hospitals. She has always written poetry and worked with poets, but did not try to get any of her work published until joining Oxford Stanza Two. |
Lizzie Ballagher
No walls, no windows
Untamed oceans at the screen-door
shut tight against their salt—
their sting and spatter of sand—bear in
the same sea-scent, which whines,
insinuating, through keyholes; froths
in foaming jars of samphire on the kitchen shelf.
Outside comes to in: flash of goldfinch wings—
black-yellow-silver—they one year nested
on the porch in pots of blue lobelias, salvias;
on mats, the smear of mud from Havenfold—
a field, though rank with cow-dung—
where blood-red poppies blow in May;
the shrill of chrome-beaked herring-gulls
haunting a chimney breast, blown in
by gales, lamenting on our sills;
black-beaked head of a volcano looming
through the window-frame, demonic shadow cast
across galaxies of lupins, lupins, all unploughed.
No walls can work; no windows, doors,
can block when, in all our houses, outside
comes to inside like a tide.
After something of a writer's drought, Lizzie Ballagher is encouraged to have more work in print and in performance than for a long time. She recently took part in the Fingal P0etry Festival in Skerries, near Dublin, and is due to read, too, at the Poetry on the Lake Festival in Italy in October. She finds that poetry - both on the page and on stage - offers unique insights not often found in prose, and that it shines light into and over dark places in life. |
Stephen Claughton
Umbrellas
‘It is not where it is or what it is that matters
but how you see it.’ – Saul Leiter
Rain streaks a café window
on the Lower East Side,
blurring the street beyond—
the same in the automat
and the barber’s shop,
a dissolve of lens-like droplets.
It’s a rainy day in New York,
a diluvial downpour.
Slickers and rubbers are out
and it’s hats off to men in hats,
who are having their last hurrah
in fifties America.
But the shots Saul really wants,
the ones it’s worth getting wet for,
are those that feature umbrellas.
Red, green, maroon and black,
they mushroom everywhere,
dotted along the street,
or clustering at crosswalks,
forming testudos braced
against the incoming attack.
Rain beats on their drum-tight
skins and bounces off.
It’s neat how their shapely curves
offset the sharp-elbowed angles
of Gotham’s gridiron blocks,
making the East Coast exotic.
All over Manhattan Island,
umbrellas are opening up
the Japanese floating world of ukiyo-e.
Geishas blossom like cherry trees
with bright paper parasols,
making light of it all.
‘Not umbrellas again,’
his lab assistant groans.
‘I love umbrellas!’ says Saul.
Stephen Claughton grew up in Manchester, read English at Oxford and worked for many years as a civil servant in London. His poems have appeared widely in print and online and he has published two pamphlets, The War with Hannibal (Poetry Salzburg, 2019) and The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). He is the Chair of Ver Poets and reviews for London Grip and The High Window. He blogs occasionally at www.stephenclaughton.com, where links to his poems, reviews and pamphlets can be found. |
Lucy Ingrams
putting away tools
this poem will not give you pippins | waxcaps | redwings | walnuts | gales or other names
in the book of autumn
or rewind dialects of summer : common blue or damselfly or marguerite
or dwell on pale bodhisattva bulbs beneath the clay waiting for enlightenment or spring
instead this poem combs defeat and grass that used to high and tine the sun to green
but yellows to tobacco now straggles in the dark of stars and cold
which leaves the mower some shed-space for it and sitting out the long vowels of winter—
Lucy Ingrams' first pamphlet, Light-fall (2019) was published by Flarestack Poets and her debut collection, Signs (2023) by Live Canon. Awards for her work include the Manchester Poetry Prize and Magma’s poetry prize. She is based in Oxford. |
You can find the podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-26-e2op29p or on Audible or Apple podcasts.
Next month's episode will have the theme 'canonical' and it hopes to look at the canon, whatever that may be, from many different angles. If you would like to contribute, please send submissions of up to four minutes' recording of unpublished poems with the texts and a short author bio to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com.
Deadline: October 18th.
Suggestions or comments are always welcome and should be sent to the same address.
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