Submit your island tales

Iona cr Judy DarleyFor their first issue of 2016, Brain of Forgetting invites work on the theme of islands.

There’s something so enticing about islands – the way they’re often surrounded by water, enveloped by mist or engulfed by storms. There’s potential for serenity or peril, and plenty of myths to dabble in.

The journal editors say: “Islands have always played a special role in literature and the popular imagination. What we’re looking for is work that interprets the theme ‘Island’ in an original way that engages with the past. Varying interpretations from international authors and artists are encouraged. In particular we are interested in work that challenges and redefines notions of insularity.”

Send up to four poems (100 lines max each), up to two pieces of flash fiction (900 words max each) or one short piece of creative non-fiction (1,200 words max).

For a taste of work they relish, see Issue 1: Stones, or Issue 2: Poppies.

Submissions are open until December 31st 2015, so you just have time to slip ashore before the tides turn.  The Island issue will be published in print in February 2016.

Find full details of how to submit at http://www.brainofforgetting.com/submissions.html.

Book review: And in Here, the Menagerie by Angela Cleland

And In Here The Menagerie by Angela ClelandThere is a delicious sense of solidity to the poetry in  Angela Cleland’s And in Here, the Menagerie. Words slot into their allotted spaces with satisfying clunks that continue to resound long after you put down this debut collection.

Angela has a background in performance poetry, and this experience is evident in her work that just aches to be read aloud, preferably in a seductive Scottish accent. She is adept at conjuring up entire worlds for us to explore, often hurrying us along so we catch glimpses of scenes we crave to see more of. Continue reading

A poem about pigeons

Pigeon cr Judy DarleyI admit, I have a curious fondness for pigeons. Something about their dauntlessness as they crowd the city streets, pecking for crumbs and dodging vehicles impresses me, possibly more than it should. So when I saw a call for poetry submissions about these generally unbeloved birds, I had just the poem in mind.

Happily, my poem Crusty was accepted for publication and now roosts in the poetry anthology Poeming Pigeons along with many feathered friends. It’s available from The Poetry Box, but you can read it here.

Crusty by Judy Darley

We’ve reached an understanding, he and I
sharing the same street corner
ignored by the same passersby.
His stained blanket mirrors my ragged wings
We both limp from hunger and on twisted limbs.
His fractured, fractious stories echo my plaintive call
His rheumy eyes, filth-clouded, reflect my skies, dismal.
We’ve both experienced the same fall from grace,
existing on life’s edges in this wretched place.
He raids the bins, eats what he can, and what he can’t he passes on.
When night crowds in, I rise to roost
watching over him till dawn.

Book review – Walking Away by Simon Armitage

Walking Home by Simon Armitage“There’s a sameness to this kind of walking, with the corner of my right eye always full of the blueness of the water and my left always full of the greenness of the land.”

So writes Simon Armitage shortly into the follow-up to his troubadour travelogue Walking Home, in which he hiked the Pennine Way. In Walking Away, Simon is again travelling without a penny to ease his way, instead relying on his poems to secure bed and board, plus the funds for the occasional ice cream, by reading his work to enthralled and occasionally bemused gatherings between Minehead and The Scilly Isles.

It’s a pleasingly audacious idea – a challenge to himself to discover whether or not poetry has a relevance in the present day. Almost every evening he gives a reading, in part to see who will attend, and after each event a large sock is left out which attendees are invited to drop donations into, not all of which turn out to be monetary.

Armitage is a hugely likeable fellow, with a keen eye for the gentle absurdities of the world, making each step of the way a delight. He notices things many of us might overlook, so that his commentary is peppered with oddities such as “wilfully quirky signposting”, lanes “so upholstered with spongy luminous green moss it has the appearance of a sea bed or coral reef” and, as the tide rolls in, moored boats in the bay “stirring and righting themselves like horses after sleep.”

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Poetry review – Of Love and Hope

Of Love and Hope coverFewer subjects seem to inspire more poetry than the thorny topic of love, so it takes a lot for one book of love poems to jump out from the pile. Of Love and Hope does it rather beautifully though, without shouting for attention, but simply by being spilling over with thoughtful, evocative words.

The fact that this poetry anthology is sold in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care certainly helps. Nothing assuages the guilt of paying out for yet another book (when your shelves are already packed with unread ones) like knowing the proceeds go to a good cause.

Plus you really are likely to read this one. Editor Deborah Gaye has brought together a carefully selected array of poems that twist, flip and sigh their way into your emotions.

The poets who contributed to the anthology are truly top-notch, counting among their number Seamus Heaney, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Victoria Wood, Arthur Smith, Sir Paul McCartney, Roger McGough, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch and Margaret Atwood. An impressive guest-list! Continue reading

Two small poems

Woman preparing pineapple, Borneo cr Judy DarleyA small poem of mine, Strays,  has been published in the current issue of Literary Bohemian, one of the most beautiful online publications of travellers’ tales that I know.

The poem appears in Issue 22 – Something About Water, although my ode is entirely earthy (it is set on an island, but a sizeable one) – curious when so many of my poems and stories are water-themed and inspired. As the editors comment, the issue is mostly about water, but also about sex and war. I think my poem encompasses both of the latter in a small way.

There are some wonderful reads in the issue, so do have a browse. I’m particularly taken with Ariana Nadia Nash’s The Pond. It holds the depths of a novel in just four brief, beautiful paragraphs. Impressive.

You can read Strays here. I’ll warn you, it isn’t one of my prettiest. I wrote it during an extraordinary trip to Borneo. The lady pictured here features in the poem, though she doesn’t have a starring role.

My small poem Intimacy has been published by Nutshells and Nuggets, a lovely lit mag that focuses on very short poems. I’m really pleased they chose to publish this one because it was written from the heart about my beloved. A small poem, about a big man!

You can read Intimacy here.

Poetry review – Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest

hold-your-own coverTaking the myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, Tempest sets out her own thoughts about identity, love, sexuality and growing up, and sets them alight.

Tempest is no newcomer to the UK’s poetry scene. A regular at London’s rap battles from the age of 16 (she’s now 28), her work has since expanded and shifted poetry-wards with performances at London lit night Bookslam, before taking Wasted, and then the award-winning spoken word performance Brand New Ancients on the road, and across the Atlantic. Oh, and this year her first album, Everybody Down, was nominated for a Mercury Prize. Kate’s goal, you might agree, is self-expression by any and every means possible.

She self-published her first poetry collection Everything Speaks In Its Own Way before coming to the attention of Picador, who have brought out her coming of age collection stapled to the tale of the gender-shifting prophet. Continue reading

Cox – a small poem

Cox apple cr Judy DarleyDid you know that today, October 21st 2014, is World Apple Day? Created to celebrate the riches and variety offered up by British orchards, it’s the perfect excuse to bite deep, crunch loudly and allow sweet juices to spill over your lips and run down your chin. Bliss!

To mark this day I’ve written a small, slightly sensual, somewhat sinister poem that tweeters on the brink of being a haiku.

Cox
With your knife I slice
it quite in half, revealing seeds
that resemble tears.

Poetry review – Beautiful Girls by Melissa Lee-Houghton

beautiful girls coverHalf truth, half dare, Melissa Lee-Houghton’s second collection, Beautiful Girls, carries you through a landscape of secure hospitals, red light districts and bedrooms where little sleep seems to happen, through adolescent yearnings, childhood dread and adult regrets piled together in a disconcerting, fragile heap that seems likely to topple over at the slightest pressure.

Sinister undertones give way to outright panic, and Lee-Houghton unflinchingly casts grenades in our midst, strewn with lines so tightly wound they may well explode.

In Jade, the opening lines can refer to nothing good: “They called me at three o’clock in the afternoon to tell me/ you’d no longer be able to call me at three o’clock in the morning”.

Couplets like these bound from poem to poem, each so original I want to copy them down, savour their sly promises. (In Sundown by the Abattoir, “Nobody trusts a blue sky./ I am too good to be true and you are too good to be true.” Irresistibly damning.)

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