Delighted to have a poem accepted for this year’s Chichester Festival magazine. Thank you Barry Smith for all that you do. The reading is tonight if anyone is interested, though I can’t be there as I’ll be watching Assassins at the CFT. (probably a good thing anyway as I’m having one of my regular periods of self-doubt as to whether my writing is actually any good…do all writers go through this?) I might need to book an…
Fabulous evening at The Front Room last night. Thanks to all the performers and audience for turning up on a wet Thursday in Southsea. Too many highlights to mention. It really was a superb evening, such a variety of different styles and voices, each with a very different take on the theme (albeit most, like mine had a very loose link to Ginsberg’s Howl !). The main headliner by Geoff Allnutt, AKA The Speech Painter…
Outside poetry, my day job is spent working in recruitment. I place candidates in companies around the world, primarily in tech start ups and expanding companies. In the last year I’ve filled roles in Australia, Singapore, Hungary, Poland, Germany, The Netherlands, UK and US. I’m currently working in the UK, Germany and Sweden. For anyone new to this blog, I’ve had over 120 poems appear in magazines, and a first collection of my poetry was…
Tarnishing and Rust On empire’s home-port shore,an old strength resisting.Lucknow to Sierra Leone,yellow fever to mutiny,marble balm for victories’ loss. A row of forgotten obelisks;lists of salt-seasoned names,of letters that shined like surffused in iron and brass,to seal a collective sigh. But stone flakes into shrapnel, the once hard edges of words,soft and reddening. Metal breaks down and dissolvesinto the reckoning earth. First published in Poetry & All That Jazz (2021) Portsmouth is full of monuments to…
Delighted to have a couple of poems in the latest edition of the High Window, out today. Haven’t had the chance to read through yet, but knowing some of the other poets appearing it will be great. Have a read through here https://thehighwindowpress.com/category/poetry/
Back from a few days holiday – my first break since starting a new job in October. I needed it. Whilst the new role is great (it’s amazing how feeling valued at work improves both your productivity and mental well-being!) I was getting tired, and starting to struggle a little. I’m currently recruiting in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Singapore, with candidates for some of these roles coming from a range of locations around…
I’ve hardly submitted anything anywhere this year. Work pressures, lack of belief in my own writing, time spent on other activities. The usual excuses. But as I start to write again, I am starting to look out for new opportunities to submit poems. I follow a good few magazines on Twitter, so am watching out for magazine open submission windows. There are also a few listing sites I use. But it can be a bit…
A quick post to plug a relatively new online (also available in print format) magazine in which I have a prose piece appearing. You can read it here; Crow Name, issue 3 https://crowname.com/crow-name-issue-3/ I hope you enjoy it and the rest of the writing within Crow Name. It’s an international magazine with writers from around the world.
Delighted to receive a copy of the latest Dreich anthology, Summer Anywhere. My poem On the Success or Otherwise of Disposable Barbecues makes an appearance amongst 200 pages of poems by other poets. I’ve not read them all yet, (my copy arrived yesterday), but what I have read so far is excellent. Fellow Portsmouth poet (and Ted Hughes award winner) has a superb poem in the anthology. You can order a copy here if interested;…
I’ve had a couple of new acceptances in the last couple of days – another acceptance for Green Ink Poetry, and a poem in the first edition of Acropolis Journal. Both are online magazines. I’ll share both when they go live, though one is pretty dark – to put it mildly – and will need a trigger warning. I thought I would use this as an opportunity to share how I track my poetry submissions…