Poetry Worth Hearing: Episode 35

The 35th episode of Poetry Worth Hearing had as its prompt 'making up'. As ever, I hoped poets would interpret this as widely as they needed to and suggested a triplet of ideas as starting points: making up as reconciliation, cosmetics or fiction. Then I realised there are many more possible meanings including the basic idea of structure or composition. The most numerous responses considered the theme of reconciliation; others went to lipstick and mascara and all were composing or making something up.

The featured poet for this episode is Dane Holt, who talks about becoming a poet and his work at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, as well as some of the writers who have influenced him. He also reads from his recently published collection, Father's Father's Father.

Other poets included in this episode are Michaela Brady, Stephen Paul Wren, Guy Jones, Margaret Poynor-Clark, John Vickers, Richard Lister, Stephen Claughton, Selena Wisnom, Paul Fallon, Geoff Edwards, Tricia Parry, Benedicta Norrell, Heather Moulson and Maureen Jivani.

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Dane Holt’s debut poetry collection, Father’s Father’s Father, was published in 2025 by Carcanet and was a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation. His pamphlet, Many Professional Wrestlers Never Retire (Lifeboat Press) was a 2023 Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice. In 2018, he won the inaugural Brotherton Poetry Prize, awarded by the University of Leeds. His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Review, Granta, The London Magazine, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere.

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Michaela Brady

If Not Now

You drive me to pray

because I think I just let you pass

our ghosts on the Post Road.

I don’t know what for,

but it’s a safe sort of shame;

if I beg the firmament

for a glitch in the how it’s been

and you turn at the figment of my voice,

then it was always chance,

another cinematic coincidence.

So I’m trapped on the cusp of 3am,

hovering over an offer for LinkedIn Premium

because we’re too digitally estranged for a proper message.

Believe me, it’s not love. It’s worse:

catastrophic, malignant,

a surgeon’s business,

a corrupted impulse

to bolt to your side,

punch your arm and brand you with my laughter,

fall into your duck step with my pigeon toes,

break your voice again,

and weave around your bloodied fingers.

Distance was the best decision,

and no matter what I send,

a decade does wonders for the heart.

It’s just another night spent writing

in pseudonyms in case you ever find me,

starving for you as I did

when my words made no goddamn sense,

and to catch your eye was my greatest discovery.

I Can’t Say It

2024.

I can’t say it’s a coincidence

when you appear out of the blue

and we glide downhill to that stalwart postbox,

surviving all these years, nestled in the mews.

I would say the waves revealed you

but I’ve already drowned and surfaced

and vowed never to swim in England’s waters again.

The silence between us is so correct.

In the glow of this final evening,

you and I jest and parry and strike

and we are as close as colleagues.

You know it’s goodbye for another year,

and I can wait until the coast erodes

and we’re the only fossils to uncover.

I’ve learned to pace around my words,

so I leave it up to you.

Say it when you’re finally alone,

when I haunt your dreams tonight.

I can’t say it until you want me to.

Vivo in Spe

2025.

The conversation would begin

when I really don’t have the time

after a decade of lathing fingernails,

reformed, regrown,

retelling the myth of your skin.

The conversation would begin

downhill

to wherever we needed to go

at the pace you set.

The conversation would begin

every word would halt

on arrival, joints rusted

but relieved to move again.

The conversation would be

volleyed over the parapet,

playacting a Great War

fantasy of the proper way to do this.

The conversation would run

into the sea, compress us

until we choked,

scan for algae-coated answers,

surge to the surface.

The conversation would jerk

and rev to life,

illuminate the time lost

and sure it would blind us

but please believe me, we’d adjust.

It would replay this faded fable.

We'd forgive ourselves for forgetting.

The conversation would end

but never truly, the way

the sky is never truly dark

as long as there are stars.

Then the conversation would begin and

the conversation would begin and

the conversation would begin and

Michaela Brady writes: My writing explores belonging, mis/communication, grief and mental health. Originally from NYC, I moved to the UK to pursue a master's at Oxford University, and have lived there since. My work is featured in Blood + Honey, Clepsydra, Corporeal, Harrow House Journal, Candlelit Chronicles, BarBar, GROUND Journal and Feast Zine, among others. Recently, I was shortlisted for Femmesocial Press's poetry contest, was a featured poet in the Oxford Di-Verse Poetry Festival, and a finalist in the 2024 London Independent Story Prize. This November, I will be a featured poet at the Oxford Indie Book Fair.

Stephen Paul Wren

Healing supper

We eat gammon joint with veg, and

Dad thanks me for cooking. Between

us, Love sits on unnoticed wings.

Do they belong to an eagle?

I move towards Dad’s kindness, then

raise my glass of water to dry

lips. In the dusk’s light, I know God

is his locomotor system.

Dad’s calcium levels are low,

so I urge his bisphosphonates.

To make dense clouds in bone skies.

To reduce the risk of fractures.

Stephen Paul Wren received his PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge. Stephen launched and developed the Molecules Unlimited poetry community. This innovative group explores the intersect of poetry and the chemical sciences. He can also be found on Instagram/Threads @luke12poetry.

Stephen’s poetry can be read at www.stephenpaulwren.wixsite.com/luke12poetry and he has written many books. ‘Elementar’ (a collaboration with visual artist Laura Kerr) was published by Paper View Books in 2024; ‘Formulations’ (co-written with Dr Miranda Lynn Barnes) was published by Small Press in 2022; and ‘A Celestial Crown of Sonnets’ (co-written with Dr Sam Illingworth) was published by Penteract Press in 2021. His poem sequence 'A Runner's Lament' was published by Ice Floe Press in March 2025. Atomic Bohemian will publish his book ‘Permanence’ (co-written with Lesley Anne Curwen) later in 2025, and Turas Press will publish ‘The Chemistry of Emotion' (co-written with Fiona Perry) in 2026. His work appears in countless poetry publications.

Guy Jones

The Third Pint Revisited

Performed at: DIY Poets

In the aftertaste

of Welsh

bitter

beer

under a hole in the sky

beyond the twisting lanes

and the dunes

where we once cast

spells together

a bottle bobs

Hopeful words

copied from a song

were

in innocence

placed

in the neck

and the bottle

cast

onto an ocean

decades away

Caught on the tides

blown by the winds

of half-remembered things

it has drifted

It has drifted

Gently now

unlooked for

the message washes

onto these

fondly remembered sands

with a new definition

of youthful

promise

and the aftertaste

fades

and mellows

filling the sky

crimson

like a sunset

after a good storm

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.

Margaret Poynor-Clark

Margarita

is a one-in- ten- thousand chance find. with that certain lustre. grown in a mollusc with lips tight shut for most of her years. now slipped from her shell. she brushes her dry autumn hair. caresses the hand-me-down pearls, a gift from her mother, the twinset her sister gave her. checks the seams of her stockings, her slip isn't showing. opens her compact, powders her nose with her Max Factor Crème Puff. snaps the lid shut. takes an embroidered handkerchief from the top drawer. heads out the door.   

Margaret Poynor-Clark is a retired paediatrician living in East Lothian She started writing in 2020 and is now making up for lost time. Her poems have been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Pennine Platform, Dream Catcher and anthologies To Light the Trails by Sidhe press, and Ukraine Anthology by Wildfire Words. She received a mentoring award from The Wigtown Poetry Festival in 2022

John Vickers

Fullerene, graphene pharmaceutics

O Fullerene aroma

Who collapses into the 4D

Quantum Hall

Effects

In Gravity’s Magnetic Encephelogram

Touched for the very first time

Like a virgin

Thy turbulences

Direct nanotubes

Of Quetiapine into 108 degrees

Of pentagon aperiodicities

Unwrapping the cells dopamine

If I believed

In an interventionist God

My psychoses of living

Unwrapped in Stationary Towers

Into SSRIs

The refocalising

Consolidated by relative sleep

And the sleep of understanding

O Gravitons detected by Chern numbers

‘Mind scanning’

Erbarme dich, Ich habe genug

The six yogas

Of tantric sex mornings

Of love larval egos

Extending the phenotypes

Come home Cathy, come home now

To my resonances in sp2 orbitals

Come home now

After his Phd in Maths at Bristol University, Dr John DL Vickers worked as an Oxford University Fellow at The Maths Institute which led to a similar position at Humboldt University in Berlin where he worked on technical problems concerning the development of canonical inner models as a foundation for infinity. A visiting fellowship at Bristol University followed where he published papers for academic journals. John returned to Oxford University in their brain imaging department coding with a focus on spin glasses. Creative interests took over and John is now focused on intertwining his love of Maths with the arts. John's paintings are exhibited regularly at The Lampet Arms in Upper Tadmarton, and will be at The Mill in Banbury from winter 2025 and he has published widely in UK Poetry Journals and Magazines.

Richard Lister

Eye witness

“An envious sliver of willow broke,

tumbling Ophelia into that stream,

so she, with snippets of folk song, floated,

embroidered, silvered dress spread wide.

Insensitive to her risk, settled, calm,

beyond thinking, no longer distraught,

hands clasped as for the supplicant charm

of a prayer.  It’s as if she hadn't caught

my son Hamlet's most troubled heart, thoughts

all enmeshed with his own but at what cost?

As he talked madness at my husband’s court,

she is drawn, sinks down under and is lost.”

Yet - can we trust this witness? For this queen

looks to retain her crown by guile, unseen.

Richard Lister enjoys coming alongside people and helping them to take their poetry to the next level.  His poetry draws you into stories of intriguing characters, places and images.  Richard’s latest book, Scattered with Grace, is ‘a sumptuous collection, sprinkled with humour and a generosity of spirit’.  He has had work in 14 international publications and 5 exhibitions.

Stephen Claughton

The Piggery

The sniff of the real, that’s what I’d want to get’

                                    – Thom Gunn

The pigs were a special treat.

We’d stop by their house of bricks,

a mossed barn flush with the lane,

where my father, Yorkshire born

and a countryman at heart,

would practise his pig impressions.

His was no idle oinking;

he’d wrinkle up his nose

and truffle for the sound,

digging deep to unearth

a wealth of expressive grunts

that the pigs obligingly answered.

We couldn’t actually see them,

bricked up in their piggy purdah,

just heard their snuffling and snorts.

What fun it would be, I thought,

if there were another joker

the other side of the wall

doing pig imitations of Dad,                             

each taking the other side in

with hints of a rumoured existence.

But I knew the beasts were there.

I’d got the sniff of the real—

unmistakable, the lavish stink of pig.

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.

Selena Wisnom

Kabuki costume

How long can you hold out

your arms before they start to tremble?

The lobster’s wildly flailing whisker

betrays your never ailing muscle

exaggerated tendrils swinging

hanging from your hair and pendant crown.

As your layers part like a fan

kilo upon kilogram adorned with drama

invisibly strain against

the drumming of the solar flame

the banded seasons each racing in their lane

all slowed to the speed of snow and blossom falling.

You need a passion that sets fire to temples

that animates dead petals into rats

to gnaw the bonds that hold you like a lover

as carp climb up the waterfall

against all odds. The dancers must bear

the heart of the world labouring under illusions

as heavy as our age. But this is a world

where fish can grow up to be dragons

and discover what water is

that water was once the air they breathed.

Selena Wisnom is a writer and academic specialising in the poetry of ancient Iraq, and adapts ancient Babylonian verse forms into English. Her poems have won first prize in The Literateur-TLC poetry competition, and have been published in Mslexia, Wild Court, and Blackbox Manifold. Her book “The Library of Ancient Wisdom” is published by Penguin.

Paul Fallon

That Ole Devil called Love

ordinance eyes survey bulbous hoods

through rose-tinted spectacles,

marinated Mother

makes a meal of it

with vino to stifle the whine

-       don’t want to wake the kids

for the umpteenth time

the GP’s chattel

a lonesome rattle

-       day-glos

to make the

-       day go

maybe forever

it’s a sweltering night

past 11 o’clock

the pubs spill out,

a good hiding is on it’s way  

knock, knock, guess who?

angels perch and peek

-       frozen –

out of sight

listening to mummy and daddy

-       howl –

weeping, smashing, cracking

let’s dance,

put on your red shoes

and dance the blues

head in the sink

– tap dancing

crash to the floor

- body-popping

glance to the wall

- head-banging

just gotta tag along

with that ole devil called love

morning

usual routine

-       cleanse, tone, moisturise -

make up

Acknowledgements

Billie Holiday, ‘That Ole Devil Called Love’

David Bowie, ‘Let’s Dance’

Paul Fallon is fascinated by the human condition – our playfulness,

spirit, soul, psyche, connection to nature. Through his poems, he seeks

to share stories or capture moments with compassion – to throw ropes

out to the reader and spark their empathy and feeling to be human. In the past year, Paul

has been warmly supported as a member of  Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society Stanza

group,

Geoff Edwards

Catching Up

Lost time

like the orchard floor rustle of leaves

covering the discarded

something under missed, perhaps

or just a puff of wind, tugging the sleeping blanket, perhaps

Longing reclamation

echoes of soffit whispers in yesterday stroll

now a nagging journey, like

the tapping, of a door ajar

from an open window waft of wind

Clawing back

pulling the past closer

the years, the seconds, the footsteps

Time lost, perhaps

Time made-up, perhaps, hide and seek in the breath

Nibbling the unsellable apple of time

the fruit shines different, on the road back, perhaps

time's imperfect touch

yields the orchard of moments no second harvest, perhaps

the question, is in the taste of the wind

Geoff Edwards moved to The UK in 2005 and started writing poetry in 2023 after closing his Electrical Engineering Business in Norfolk. He has two poems published in Wheelsong Books, Anthology 3. 

Tricia Parry

Making Up

A wall as big as the great Asian wall

As mighty as a Roman wall

Encircling many beautiful towns.

He on one side

Me on the other

Between us a ravine.

Deep as any ocean

Steep sides, jagged rocks

Grey skies overhead.

No way back, so it would seem

But our foundations are deep

Just like those walls.

Before night falls a gesture

A tearful smile, outstretched hand

Drawbridge is lowered.

Slowly and surely

The chasm is crossed

Tentative touch, upturned face.

One small step then another

Embrace is never sweeter

Than when we are making up.

Tricia Parry writes: We moved from the North East of Scotland to Surrey to be nearer our children and grandchildren and I accepted an invitation to join a writer’s group in the village.  I wrote life experiences and with the help and encouragement of fellow writers I have taken a few tentative steps into the realms of poetry.

Benedicta Norell

Armistice

On the other side, 

I find the old us. 

A sob from the heart,

a shiver to the soul, 

the gift of our bodies,  

together. Truffles

that spill crumbs,

hand-made shoes,

private rock concerts,

all out here in the open.

How easy those lies

about not being wanted,

I almost believed them.

It is not hard to be loved.

Don’t stay in the shelter,

don’t miss victory day.

Benedicta Norell is a former editor whose work has appeared in anthologies, including To Lay Sun into a Forest from Sidhe Press, and magazines and webzines such as Blue Press and Atrium Poetry. Terrible Mother, her debut pamphlet published by Black Cat Poetry Press in 2024, sold out in two months. She is writing a collection about midlife and menopause. 

Heather Moulson

Made Up

Beige liquid blending into my unwelcome skin

Tan soaked tissues make a pile

On the sticky dressing room table

Coral Pink runs over my tight cheeks

Leichener in front of a bulbed mirror

False eyelashes put on with spit

And an Almay lipstick of spiteful red

The tannoy calls for Beginners 

Big Knickers! My co-star shouts

One more cigarette

A sodden Scarlett cork tip

I think I’m pregnant

Mascara 

Miners brownish black - the answer to everything. 

Accentuating the length of your wispy eyelashes. 

Spitting on block mascara with a slippery brush,

Could make you look like Alice Cooper. 

According to the bigger girls at school,

Reams of blacked up eyes really do count,

And when you cry, it has to run down your cheeks.

Heather Moulson 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  

Maureen Jivani

Dior

I find the coral lipstick,

you bought in Vancouver,

recalling your absent smile

I pink my lips,

I tongue your gloss-embedded

DNA, resurrect your kiss.

DNA

My grandfather

collected wives

like ration stamps,

from Liverpool

to Nova Scotia

he buried his seeds.

He stares at me

from a photo

taken in Fly, Ohio.

The seaman’s cap,

a war-time cliché placed

upon his head

and I am struck by lightning –

his familiar mouth

his cold-black eyes.

Maureen Jivani’s  Insensible Heart  (2009)  Mulfran Press was shortlisted for The London New Poetry Award 2010.   She has pamphlet, My Shinji Noon Mulfran Press  (2010). She is published in magazines in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and USA. Recent work has been published in Alba, Ink Sweat and Tears, Orbis, Poetry Worth Hearing, Strix, The Alchemy Spoon, The Friday Poem, The High Window,  Scintilla,  Seminary Ridge Review, Time Haiku Journal, Under the Radar, and Wales Haiku Journal.

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That's all for this episode. You can find the podcast at https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ozzyMhDiLtdMzU3WIA39b?si=Bto6INFcQGyGWHcIClY7zg and on You Tube, Spotify and Audible podcasts.

The prompt for the next episode is 'games people play'. This can mean anything you want it to mean, including football. The deadline is 18th October. As always, you should sesnd up to 4 minute recording of unpublished poems plus texts plus short bio to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com. Please, please listen to your recording before sending it to check that you have not accidentally tapped the microphone, rattled your papers or included an unexplained but intrusive electronic hum.