Dead North M1 7 p.m. Braided like D.N.A. we flicker in a northbound lane twined like flax woven with fertilizer lorries, flat-loads tankers and porta-kabins under digitised words ‘salt spreading’ Capital’s crawling artery bunged northward creeps each vein full of despatch tall orders, whims and haste precision marketing targets the next truck reads REALITY: realitygroup.com…
Poem a day? The Return
Probably a forlorn hope but trying to write a poem a day to get back to writing ..here the first try. Will end up a poem every other day or a poem a week if lucky but at least started . No preamble to this just wrote it – will consider meaning about five years…
Last Farmer: Salt Modern Voices No.6
Yes I finally have a solo publication as a poet. Not bad after 25 years of writing. It is due to be released soon and you can pre-order from Amazon and Asda (links below). My thanks to Chris Hamilton Emery and Salt for picking up on the poems. I am really chuffed that I am…
Landlocked
LANDLOCKED Tied to a flat land Of reclaimed pits and winding river The railway has gone Coal blackened tracks have grown over Every wind caresses its absence The silent factories know their part But cannot speak, chains hold fast Beyond pale gates and security huts Poppies and cow parsley, ragwort and buddleia A necklace of flowers…
The Shipstone Star
THE SHIPSTONE STAR Red lead rain lashed to pink hangs like a soviet star on the left side of Nottingham’s tunic. Always east facing, a towering symbol. The dawn of a century personified, rusts above a city of casual workers, bicycles and the hard slogging dutiful dead who fleck fields from the Rhone to the…
Downland Ballad I :Photo-disintegration
Fully five acres further east and fifty years on from Harwell’s neutron beam photo-disintegration a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace* wavers like a bridesmaid’s posy above the quarried chalk and flint of this erased line. The track that gravelled and iron girded once carried trundling freight to Southampton docks and salt air. Like a distant…
Train Diary
This was the project I did not complete and show at Lincoln because I became so disillusioned with the course. Instead I showed the ‘Suit of Nettles’ PR show cop-out..to fill the space as I felt this project was too complicated for what was basically a craft show…. The basic premise is as follows…
Lowdham Festival Staple Launch
Saturday 28 June Launch of the East Midlands edition of Staple Roberta Dewa, Derrick Buttress, Antony Cropper, Shaun Belcher, Clare Brown and Michael Pinchbeck – all Nottinghamshire writers – launch a Staple special edition, with short fiction, poetry and a memoir of living in Wilford! Non-fiction Marquee, behind the Village Hall
Staple Magazine: Three poems
Three poems published in latest Staple Magazine Rivers I have Visited The Drifting Village The Weaver’s Lament NEW ISSUE OUT SOON! EAST MIDLANDS SPECIAL! Featuring stories by Clare Brown, Michael Pinchbeck, Roberta Dewa, Marilyn Ricci, Karen Jardine, Peter de Ville, James K Walker, Georgina Lock, Pascale Quiviger, Anthony Cropper, Jonathan Taylor, poems by Martin Stannard,…
chalkfish and monkey
Chalkfish and Monkey She picked the fish out of the box leaving a pool of mucus and blood slowly congealing on the shelf and dripped it toward the kitchen table. Outside the wind lashed the tops of the poplar trees together and rain sprayed from the barn roof opposite. She guessed the river would be…