In this episode, you can hear Tony Curtis, the distinguished Welsh poet and Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at South Wales University, talking about his life in poetry and his new book, Leaving the Hills.
The prompt for this episode was 'moving' which could be interpreted as anything from some kind of physical movement to the power of emotions. There are poems from Maggie Hall, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, Fiona Perry, Heather Moulson, Helen Overell, Kate Young, Michael Klimeš, Adam Shaw and Lizzie Ballagher.
TONY CURTIS:
has published over forty books of poetry, criticism, art commentary and fiction.
He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales and is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. Several notable influences include Donald Hall at Goddard College, the mid/west poet Norman Dubie and fellow Welshman Dannie Abse, who became a friend and mentor. In 2016 Seren published his From the Fortunate Isles: New & Selected Poems which brought together fifty years of his poetry.
Two books appeared at the end of 2021 – his first novel Darkness in the City of Light, set in wartime Paris, and Where the Birds Sing our Names, an anthology for the children’s charity Ty Hafan. Darkness in the City of Light was short-listed for the Society of Author’s Paul Torday Prize. His critically acclaimed eleventh collection Leaving the Hills was published in 2024.
Tony is very actively engaged as a speaker and is currently working on a new novel based on historical figures such as Augustus John, Sir William Orpen and Lloyd George; also a chapter for a book on contemporary art, edited by Iwan Bala, and published in 2025 – “Wales Facing the World: The Venice Biennale and Artes Mundi”.
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Maggie Hall is a poet and artist living in Australia. Her text is too long to include and is possibly still in process. |
Richard Lister
98 Rock are playing
Metallica's Ride the Lightning
- good tunes to keep you awake
on the night shift.
Hetfield's singing
time is like a fuse
and the first girder snaps
like a strand of raw spaghetti;
then, fast as a jet,
bridge trusses
fail in a wave,
arch after arch.
The deck upends:
yellow cold-planers,
dumptrucks, cars,
slide, spin, fall,
steaming asphalt
sloshes free,
slurs the lanes
with tumbling,
boiling black
and Diago
in smudged,
reflective orange kit,
steel toe-capped
boots,
mug of tea,
black and two
falls
fifteen stories
Mississippi 1
Mississippi 2
Mississippi 3
hits the water
at 70 miles per hour.
Served cold
Minkisi, British Museum, London
Brooding,
blackened sculpture,
‘Container of power
drawn from the dead’,
enclosed by glass
-fingerprint smudged,
slight break in one corner.
Your face impassive,
body pierced
by a hundred nails
like a tortured Christ.
Cut and crafted
by the Kongo people,
swindled from the land
they named
by Portuguese men,
fair skinned like me.
Does your rage still fester?
Your label: ‘to provoke
a Minkisi to action
it must be insulted
or have metal driven
into its body’.
But you already have.
I feel your stare
like you’re searching
my face. I turn away.
And stop.
Is that the sound
of glass cracking?
I start to run.
Lister’s poetry draws you into stories of intriguing characters, images & places. His Scattered with Grace is ‘a sumptuous collection, sprinkled with humour and a generosity of spirit’. In Edge & Cusp, he ‘captured life like a vibrant painting’. Lister’s work is in 13 international magazines (including Acumen & Orbis). |
Dinah Livingstone
Dante’s Divine Comedy
He lost his Beatriz and after that
was exiled from his city
in the tumult of its politics
and lost his way in a dark wood.
After an epic trek
with Virgil as his guide
down through Hell’s lowest circle
and then back
he came out and saw the stars again,
climbed Mount Purgatory to Paradise
where he was met by Beatriz.
The one who went up was the one who’d descended
to the deepest depths,
there reclaiming what had been suppressed
to achieve integrity.
Then he was able to mount on high
leading captivity captive
to reach the happy state where finally:
Now what ran the will and the desires
like a smoothly rolling wheel was
love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Dinah Livingstone has given many poetry readings in London, throughout Britain and abroad. Her tenth poetry collection,Embodiment, was published in 2019. She has received three Arts Council Writer’s Awards for her poetry, which has also appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She is a translator of poetry and prose and, after twenty years, recently retired as editor of the magazine Sofia. katabasis.co.uk/dinah.html
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Fiona Perry
Floe
Buttercup snowfest
gold coins
in smouldering daubes
We march through
their showy largesse
faces lit lovingly as if captured
in an old movie still
Cool-minded
travelling with the ice floe
happy to drift
And we keep gliding
as the copse grows taller
tipping its sugar glass rays
on to the place we are meant to be.
Fiona’s first poetry collection, Alchemy (Turas Press, Dublin), won the Poetry Book Awards (2021) Silver Medal and was shortlisted for the Rubery Prize. Her flash fiction, Sea Change, won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards (2020). Her poetry and short fiction have been published widely. |
Heather Moulson
Moving
Mum saves up her Embassy coupons
To replace the old pan cooking my porridge
I really think she should get me a Sindy doll
Because my only friend’s moving to Norwich
Doorstep toast emerges from under the grill
And my brother has nicked the jam
I’ll be alone in the midst of the playground
And no-one seems to give a damn
I say goodbye to Lynn, shivering in her mac
Standing outside her former front door
I now faced a long lonely walk to school
And my Mum asks what I’m crying for
Heather has been performing and writing poetry around London and Surrey since 2017. Her pamphlet Bunty I Miss You was published in 2019 and Heather is currently working on her next collection |
Helen Overell
Wattled Cranes
They are tall as a man,
and with great wings
outspread in dance —
dip of head,
bow to the ground —
courtly as any couple —
and sprung leaps,
feathers that flutter and sway,
and each move given and renewed,
as in shallows
where sedge and water-lilies flourish
above doubles that reach to rippled sky
in a life-long tether,
and this held freedom is the measure
the birds tread on the brow of the hill.
The woman watches,
her husband beholds her, and with arms wide
they honour each other with deep
salutation,
straighten up,
freighted with years, and step
here and there
in a rise and fall
that wheels and swoops,
puts a shape
to the loss of the son
they bore — grown and gone.
Helen 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. |
Kate Young
Pastels
The soulful tones peer from a box –
soft pastel limbs needing human touch.
I oblige, peel back their outer clothing.
We have been asked to capture movement
in the style of Degas, dancers drifting –
flutters of chiffon in moondust and sky.
I lift the palest blue, feel its chalkiness
and attempt to coax it, stroke it to life –
microscopic cells of animation forming.
It takes me to you, aqua butterflying
over the stage, all wings and ballet shoes
your instep spooning new leather.
A willow-supple-spine draws me in
takes me to that place before the tumour
shaped you inert, fixed you on its page.
My wrist has finished its whirligig dance.
I search for movement- my art is static,
the tutor’s expert hand brings you to life.
Snapshots
The fit is extraordinary,
a tiny fist curls round a finger
rosebud lips
opening closing
clamped to the seam of a breast.
A blocky school
squat on concrete rises,
a monster with gated teeth.
A small palm nuzzled inside another,
the safety of the mother-shell.
Independence looms,
the hand uncouples itself
exploring the hands of others,
jostling, teasing
mobiles locked in crab-claws.
An auditorium, applause,
slick fingers ease over keys,
jazz spirals take flight
lifting falling, always poised
on the edge of a question.
A wedding photo:
confetti-rain drizzling her braid,
her veil, eyes like fireflies,
a moon and sun circling –
hands singing a new tune.
Changes emerge.
Time drags its ragged breath
over liver skin, her son’s hand
soothing the mother-shell
her veins rooting for light.
Grief, a leaden sky.
A tiny fist curls round a finger
rosebud lips
opening closing
clamped to the seam of a breast.
Kate Young’s poetry has appeared in webzines/magazines nationally and in Canada. It has also featured in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Write Out Loud. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published with Hedgehog Press. Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk |
Michael Klimeš
What Happened to Mags
Mags cleans the three-storey house I stay in.
That is how we met. She smokes constantly,
coughs between life stories. The Yorkshire summer
has been patchy sun mixed with showers
that has made the countryside that goes forever
around Howden gleam wet. I run three times
each week to break the boredom as I do
shifts at the Press Association.
It’s a big glass mausoleum office alive
on the week days and empty at the weekends.
I spend some Saturdays there to feel less lonely.
Mags is the only person I have here and she is
the only person that has me in a strange way.
She works in a care home on the other side
of town near the church. Both back out
onto fields that are not farmed.
One day Mags invites me to dinner
and I accept out of politeness. We sit
in the White Horse Inn and I discover her kindness
but there is something very fragile about her.
Not much else happens in Howden afterwards –
Except flat fields of green that go on for miles.
When the three-month stint comes to an end,
Mags says Remember me.
The School Bus
I see Paul Westerman
with his Harry Potter spectacles
and egg-shaped head
who was a good boy
in the first year
and read novels diligently
yet got a taste for being edgy
and so stopped living
in fiction and got
into the action
of playing
to the classroom.
Next to him was Tom Pott
who was more quiet
and shifty. He stole
mobile phones
in the early noughties
including mine
and told me in PE
months after he stole it.
Behind him sat
Nadeem Abbas
who was also
in the phone business
and did various deals
in the school fields
where he gave punters goods
at cut prices, they didn’t always work.
He also did the dirty exchange
in a corner of the school corridor
when the day ended: I saw
a quick flash of silver notes.
His younger brother Naseem
got involved in the company
but specialised in CD players:
He introduced me to gangster rap.
The scariest person was Josh Welfs –
A short blond and blue-eyed boy
with a talent for violence.
He clipped everyone in rugby.
My best friend was Raza Dali,
we once talked about the future
with GSCEs and A – Levels ahead….
The letters and numbers
that would define our futures.
Before we knew it
the bus stopped and we all
got off on our separate ways.
Michael Klimeš is a financial journalist based in London. He has been published in Alchemy Spoon, One Hand Clapping Magazine and Iota. His pamphlet Love Carries the Future was shortlisted in the Full House Literary Magazine Digital Chapbook 2023 competition and longlisted in the Black Cat Poetry Press pamphlet competition 2024 and Alchemy Spoon Pamphlet Competition 2022 |
Adam Shaw
Palm in hand
I feel exposed, the power of my words.
Out of the verse, climbs a wasp.
What you heard is the buzzing of my limbs.
Learn, stop guessing, teach a lesson.
Got me thinking of your name double LL.
Listening like my ears on the side.
On the floor, invite me.
With the melody, school me.
She said glad you came,
I am too.
Smoke signals,
Earn fire red, you got me inspired.
Evoking poetics in your presence.
You give me peace of mind,
a smile that stops time.
Eating Jamaican, feel I known you longer.
Belonging, we breath music.
Love catches fire at the source.
You are simply beautiful.
Thinking of you, I am barefoot.
Reminds me of the ocean, touching land,
I feel you in the waves.
Home on the beach burning palm trees.
You got me glowing, like an owl in headlights.
In this moment we are still,
circling the field we can see in the dark,
two lovers spark by a riverside.
She said aren't your eyelashes white,
I smile say it's the light,
flying through every colour,
like crossing a rainbow.
Singing in the car, rev the engine.
Smiling at every kite, thinking,
this is how it feels to fly.
Love is the answer, ask the question.
Adam Shaw started writing poetry three years ago following a workshop at Oxford recovery college and being gifted a poetry book. Started attending workshops at Oxford poetry library and reading at various open mics in Oxford, just to say,hear the word, catweazle, Oxford poetry circle,evoke urban poetics, stanza 2, ekresiss poetry at ashmolean museum, wytham woods writing group, diverse poetry festival, action for happiness. I love poetry for its self expression and ability to connect with community. |
Lizzie Ballagher
At seventeen
That year, what changed took place when I
sat in the back of someone else’s car, set out
with friends who could already drive.
Three lanes ran like ribbons: the middle
for passing other cars…going either way.
So dangerous,
as I found out when our driver chose to leave
the road; that, or we’d all be pulped
by oncoming cars: too dark, too fast.
We shot the ditch, ploughed through a hedge,
crashed hard against the furrows of a field sown
with winter wheat—then flipped—rolled, flipped
in rain and mud: bounced, twisted, flung about.
Until I came to myself: five yards from the glass,
the busted heap of metal, smoking wheels.
I woke to watch the others crawl out
while all I could do was stare, sprawl, speechless,
choked with fear, tasting mud and grit,
hearing far off the wailing
of some poor person…who,
it turned out, was me…then testing
the bruises, contusions, cracked ribs
that belonged to some poor injured girl…
but then, it seemed, belonged to me.
What changed that year when I
was back in my own body and thinking
inside my own brain was that I knew
I could not learn to drive, nor would I ever
be a passenger along that road unless I was driven
blindfold, gagged to stop the howling horror.
Somehow, in forty seconds flat, I was tilted,
tipped, turned out of childhood’s chrysalis:
became a woman living in my woman’s skin.
Digging alone
My first time to dig the spuds alone:
I’d come with a spade too soon
and had to earth them in, and wait,
wait for flower; then wait for rain.
But when I return
to the compost box again
it overflows with sprawls
of frilled potato leaves—
white flowers shrivelled…time to see…
to slice the shovel deep through loam….
I catch my breath. Your miracle
has happened—even for me.
Pearl white, pearl hard,
pearl glossy…but bigger, smooth
as pebbles on the sea-worn Saxon shore.
I’ve longed for the consolation
of the crop; so, pause: inhale the smell
of soil; glad in this snatch of surprise
to find white globe-lamps:
inert, yet luminous
in earth’s thick darkness.
Newts
They come, in spring, by night,
without a sound:
dun-and-silver shadows slipping
between last year’s rotten leaves
when flag-irises shoot yellow arrows,
when mud begins to warm,
when the water’s just right,
when the moon’s in the best quarter….
One morning later, I see
delicate toes splayed on the surface
as they feed, turn, dive, leaving
thin trails of bubbles.
They are acrobats:
quicksilver
in the dark tent
of spring’s fevered lake.
A winner in Ireland’s 2024 Fingal Poetry Festival Competition and in 2022’s Poetry on the Lake, Ballagher focuses on landscapes. Having studied in England, Ireland, and America, she worked in education and publishing. Her poems have appeared in print and online throughout the English-speaking world. Find her blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/ |
That's everything for this episode. You can find the podcast at https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy/episodes/Poetry-Worth-Hearing-Episode-31-e30orpg
and I hope you will listen.
Comments, suggestions and submissions for future episodes should be sent to poetryworthhearing.biz. The prompt for Episode 32 is 'house' and the deadline is April 18th; the prompt for Episode 33 is 'garden' and the deadline is 18th May. As always, submissions should be up to 4 minutes recording of unpublished poems plus texts plus a short bio. Please send texts as Word not pdf as pdf does not retain its format when copied.
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