"I pick up my pencil. I wish I could call the place it comes to rest, the small and grooved knob on my fourth finger, a cradle but it is a callus..." Oh joy! @janezwart.bsky.social's pencil, sure & true, has wrought something for which we have all been waiting www.orisonbooks.com/product-page...

Such a deserving winner of the 2025 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection: Amelia Loulli for "Slip" (Cape Poetry, 2024). The poem Jan has chosen to feature in her post below (Epilogue for My Daughters) well shows why the accolade is so apposite. It is tender and fierce in equal measures.

Every one Paula Meehan plants flowers just this way. Little wonder then that this poem was chosen to meander all over London in subterranean tunnels, illuminating & brightening as it went, "../bless[ing] the power of sun / its conspiracy with the [U]nderground...".

"Why can't you write the way people want?" Frank Beckett, in a letter to his brother (The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940).

TLS Ackerley Prize evening, July 23rd. 7pm. QR Code below for details: @littletollerbooks.bsky.social

am very proud of The Benefactors audiobook. I do the main narration but over 30 others - family, friends, strangers - recorded the 50 voices that form the book’s monologues. Most had zero experience. All were BRILLIANT. Thanks to @hachetteaudio.bsky.social www.thebookseller.com/news/hodder-...

So begins a series of reflections on the writing life by the self-effacing @danielcowper.bsky.social. Concerns that Daniel raises in Pt I are (perhaps inadvertent) boastfulness--something to be avoided--and the sometimes subtle distinction between embarrassment and disgrace. Looking fwd to more.

Unworthy? Catch yerself on, Donal! @donalohanlon.bsky.social's talent is legend across my beloved N.I. He's given public readings of my poems at Belfast's Linen Hall Library. He's recorded videos of my poems on YouTube, incl this one! Go raibh míle maith agat, Donal! www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SQV...

The Bath Flash Fiction Comp is one of the best in the world. In about three hours the deadline will be reached. It's still not too late. I've tossed three hats into the ring this year so I'm hopeful but already preparing for disappointment (necessary expectation management for every writer).

A small found poem called “Lying in Wait”

"...and then we were seventy and in-between, I was forty or fifty and losing sleep about growing old, although people said, you look so young, you’re always smiling, and then I was not smiling" @carlasarett.bsky.social begs to differ with the physicists who say time is just an illusion.

I find it a little squirmy to list to recordings of my own voice, but if you don't have anything against my voice, you're welcome to listen to me read "All my life I was a bride married to amazement" over at Poetry: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Read Belfast poet @purelypoetry.bsky.social's fine review of Cdn poet @nathanael73.bsky.social's "Terminals". In the terminal form--attributed to Australian John Tranter--"the final word of each line in a source poem us used as the end-word for each line of a new poem." A Houdini challenge for sure.

Poets are pulled towards fixed forms by various forces. Not uncommonly, it is the need to harness, if not to tame, an unruly tangle of thoughts and sentiments. Result: a fine tension. In a late sonnet, Millay takes this as her theme. Recall also Bishop’s parenthetical “Write it!”

Our dear friend Dana Cromie (on Instagram, @danacromie) has an art show with Ewan McNeil at the Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver. Its last day is 30 May. Called "Pattern Language," it features Dana's stunning, geometrically complex colour wizardry. Don't miss it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVVZ...

@senecareview.bsky.social is a journal I love, and I'm so grateful to @geoffreybabbitt.bsky.social for making a spot for three of my poems in issue 55.1 with work by a bunch of writers whose books I'm lucky enough to have on my shelves. Here's the one that clocks in at 99 words, "99."

1 of 2/ "...Witty, erudite, playful and poignant, Bridgman titillates on one page and dives deep into the human soul on another. A master of language and purveyor of wit, Bridgman also shows himself capable of rendering a narrative with judicious use of well-chosen details..."

"Troops of words" indeed.

"...Show me the history, if any, not set in a fragile empire. If any is not about dying, write me that one without embellishments and without rounding down." We ponder it in diffuse, muddled thoughts. @janezwart.bsky.social writes it--artfully and with laser-focused precision.

Many thanks to @carlasarett.bsky.social--a fine poet in her own right--for the searching & thoughtful interview published today in @newversereview.bsky.social. Thank you too to editor Steven Knepper for giving space in NVR's pages to my views about the writing process. substack.com/home/post/p-...

"... so the sun hangs down its veils, so the old verbs change their invocation and their mood..." -- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, "The Litany" from The Sun-Fish (Oldcastle: Gallery, 2009)

"...There is a joy that helpless. I borrow it. I too have been loved more than makes sense." -- from "Used Benison" by @janezwart.bsky.social If you can say this, then you will know on your pulses that the grateful thought of it has never been better expressed. cah.ucf.edu/floridarevie...

A mini-course in democratic fundamentals that it would behove Pres. Drumpf to take.

"...Phil imagines Pastor Bob’s feet inside his shiny black Florsheims. Sweating through tissue-thin dress socks. Bloated. A little waxen. Yes, o God, their coffin pallor..." Deliciously irreverent & transgressive. @eleanorfuller.bsky.social just nails it here. splitlipthemag.com/fiction/0325...

This music--the first time I heard it--stopped me in my tracks & made my throat catch. The Dreame, composed by Patrick Doyle & sung by Jane Eaglen is from the soundtrack of Sense & Sensibility. Feel free to share music that affected you in a similarly profound way. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQJp...

"...I speak to my son in my mind, my first baby, the one who made us a family, who brought me back to family after all of mine had died, oh how his antics delighted us back then, no hint of the danger to come..." Brilliant, but best read sitting down.

I wrote There Was Fire in Magherafelt in response to Sinéad Morrissey's poem, There Was Fire in Vancouver (which gave its title to her 1st collection--Carcanet, 1996). My poem appears in my 1st collection, "A Lamb" (Ekstasis Editions, 2018), & is a tribute to both Sinéad Morrissey & Seamus Heaney.

Apostastrophe Sightings: An Irregular Series Most apostastrophes involve the reflexive insertion of apostrophes before the letter "s". (Think cat's and dog's.) A new variant spotted recently involves the use of an opening (left side) single quotation mark where an apostrophe belongs. Twice. Ugh.

Kim Addonzio's thought balloons make the leap, first to the written word, then to the spoken word. Yoiks! Another perfectly cast & filmed cage-rattler from @brinkerhoffpoetry.bsky.social. Can something from @dseuss.bsky.social's "frank: poems" pls be next? www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/good-g...

"...He was post-surgery, morphined up, my sister and I on night shift swabbing his nightmares." This poem confronts its unsettling subject matter on its own, harrowing ground. It chases up the spine & lodges in the heart & mind the way the last five lines of Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" do. Brilliant.

"A change is gonna come..." We surely do need it. Today I'm convinced by this guy's brilliant cover of the Sam Cooke classic that a change will indeed come.

This review reminds us that well-wrought criticism can be no less entitled to humble veneration than the work it celebrates. Konchan's poems & Treseler's review are sharp-eyed & unsentimental, suited to a world where "sacramental marital moments can go out with the tide & the data plan." Brava.

He was indeed…

CORRECTION! "The Trial of D'Arcy McGee" will be staged in OTTAWA (not Toronto) and Montréal by The Newpoint Players from Newry. But Toronto friends should partake too! Train fare from TO to Canada's capital and back is reasonable and the service and scenery are lovely.

Toronto & Montréal friends! Do not miss this! @donalohanlon.bsky.social's Newpoint Players are much-celebrated, award-winning thespians from Newry, N. Ireland. Their treatment of a dark chapter in Cdn history will be the highlight of the spring drama season. Crossing fingers for a Vancouver stop.

PK Page (d. 2010) was one of Canada's most loved poets. In her book Hologram (1994), she reintroduced the world to the Spanish poetic form, the glosa. It has since seen an rich revival. "Stefan" is one of my favourite PK poems. It records a Blakean "aha" moment about childhood wisdom & language.

There's so much to enjoy in this sepia-toned poem. It is tender but unsentimental (as one imagines the gran who is its subject would insist). Its skilful use of white space fortifies the references to "gulfs of memory." And it shows us in a beautiful way that "orchid" can serve admirably as a verb.

"I know the great secret of old age is that we still yearn for a sense of arrival, the young ones believe we are complete. What must they think when our poems ache with the same unfinished, unanswerable business of our earlier years?" Wistful words from a mature poet after reading to younger ones.

Bertrand Russell believed that language is an essential prerequisite to thought. Eminent scientists, like Evelina Fedorenko, beg to differ. Canadian P.K. Page--a poet & not a scientist--saw the folly of Russell's belief upon hearing wise words from an 11-year old. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

'This already pulsating book is further energised by Ivory’s striking collages ... a collection that is as meticulously produced as it is expertly and unflinchingly composed.’ – Nick Cooke, London Grip, on @helenivory.bsky.social's Constructing a Witch. londongrip.co.uk/2025/03/lond...

"...Gallant is an intensely moral and political writer. Her antipathy to noble stances and noisy pronouncements hovers everywhere, often as bathetic comedy." A predictably insightful assessment of Mavis Gallant's brilliant & sprawling body of short fiction from Tessa Hadley.

"…These days toy trucks and robots dance like planets in your mind. Bird boy, must you leave so soon – sit down with me and stay awhile." With alloyed sadness & joy we greeted, as parents, our children's creeping maturation & emancipation. And now our throats catch every time we read Philip's poem

Anyone with a nine to 12-year old child or grandchild should consider adding this new title from @eibhliscarcione.bsky.social to their Christmas and birthday gift stockpiles. Eibhlís is a very talented children's author and bilingual (English and Gaeilge) poet. Congratulations, Eibhlís!

“…[I]mpeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life… It’s a warm, welcoming volume, keenly demonstrating both tonal range and worldliness” Grateful to poet @shotscarecrow.bsky.social for his insightful assessment of my latest in London Grip. londongrip.co.uk/2025/03/lond...

"...that image of John Wayne lifting the girl up toward open sky, in troubled sunlight. Let's go home, he said, but she knew what he knew as family knows family, once lowered to earth, no one would raise her again. She saw her future." The Searchers deftly distilled by @carlasarett.bsky.social.

“…[I]mpeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life… It’s a warm, welcoming volume, keenly demonstrating both tonal range and worldliness” Grateful to poet @shotscarecrow.bsky.social for his insightful assessment of my latest in London Grip. londongrip.co.uk/2025/03/lond...

Christmas has come early.

"In my little life / I hope to hold / some wonder" Two poems from A Bouquet Brought Back from Space by Kevin Spenst (@kevinspenst.bsky.social) in Issue 44 of SMLTA sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com/p/in-my-litt... @anvilpress.bsky.social

Nightmarish and Orwellian: another chilling scene in the nightmare from which we cannot seem to wake up. Please read the account below of the detention of young picture book publisher & British tourist, Becky Burke, by ICE & then repost her father's heartfelt appeal for her release.