There are only two poems in a ‘traditional’ form in my first collection, and both are in the sequence. The first is this one, a sestina. I read somewhere that for a sestina to truly work, it must be about…
16 Days of Action #day15
The cliché advice when we go for job interviews or doing a performance is to think of the audience or the interviewers with no clothes on, or think of them on the toilet. Someone once said to me that another…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #day14
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #day14 Translated by violence – that witnessing violence, or carrying it out, or being the victim of it changes you in a fundamental way. It sounds obvious written out like that, but there…
16 Days of Action #day13 #16days
16 Days of Action – Day 13 This is the other poem in the sequence that I don’t usually read out loud. I wrote this at Treloyhan Manor Hotel, in St Ives. I was tutoring a residential there with the…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #Day12 #16days
The Oxford Dictionary defines a “doppelganger” as ‘An apparition or double of a living person’. There’s an interesting article on the BBC here I also found this rather strange website where you can register your details and find your very own…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #Day11
EDIT *Apologies – for some reason this post didn’t publish automatically yesterday. Instead it went to my draft folder and sat there!* Day 11 I wrote this in a temper, in a rush, in one go. I think this is…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #Day10
Day 10 Much of the information for this poem comes from https://medicalnewstoday.com and www.lenstore.co.uk When I was writing this poem, I googled ‘black eye’ and ‘what causes a black eye’ and ‘facts about eyes’. I knew what caused a black…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #Day9
Day 9 Over half way through 16 days of action. It’s been both harder and easier than I thought. Now I am returning, I’m interested in how the mode of address in the sequence changes – that there are more…
Guest Poets for the 2017 Poetry Carousel
Another brief interruption of the ’16 Days of Action’ posts. With less than a week to go before the 2017 Poetry Carousel, I thought I’d reveal the mystery guest poets for this year’s course, and the dates and guest tutors…
16 Days of Action Against Domestic Violence #Day8
Trauma is not stored as a narrative with an orderly beginning, middle and end. Memories return….as flashbacks that contain fragments of the experience, isolated images, sounds and bodily sensations that initially have no context other than fear and panic 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000…