He was younger than the atom bomb. All his life he experimented with hard-boiled eggs. He won't be home this evening, so don't worry; don't hurry to report him missing Brian Patten was young. That was the whole point. As you can tell, i'm a little bit cross

'The Labour MP Helena Dollimore said it would be a “great shame” if 1066 country – the area named after the battle – was locked out of “this national moment”.' The MP for Hastings and Rye thinks that the greatest defeat in English history was a "national moment" Macron knows what he is doing!

A wake up call to publishers everywhere. No matter what gendre. I couldn't stop flicking back to the cover as I read the poems. I didn't get all the connections but it was fun trying. Make Bookcovers Relevant Again! ps there is much more to this important collection, but this one great idea

viewed from Perthshire it's called a Saltire! Thank-you for your wish which came true though we are off to the local drama club performance tonight with our macks under our sensible arms because the rain is due to start during the second act.

I love that the cover picture is part of a collection in which work colleagues touch each other corporately, parents inevitably age, friends and siblings are lost and found. @robinhoughton.bsky.social is the radiologist who in showing us more than we can see Illuminates our darkness. Precious poetry

I buy small press poetry books a lot. I always order and buy through my local shop, The Watermill in Aberfeldy, when I can even though most presses encourage me to buy direct. I assume what I do is better for press and poet - moving books through distributers - but am I wrong?

I'm loving everty minute of 'sat with and reread'ing it.

Yea @robinhoughton.bsky.social the wonderful Watermill bookshop got this to me in Aberfeldy on publication day. lovely to have met you at the #poetry book fair on Saturday. this counts as my seventh purchase from that event. Looking forward to your next edition of @planetpoetry.bsky.social

On my way to Free Verse #Poetry Book Fair at St Columba's in London, I'll be helping out on the Frogmore Press table... See you there?

I took 3 goes to get into Lapwing @hannahcopley.bsky.social but now I’m in I can't get out. My father was not like yours. I did have an arable childhood among pee-wits, skylarks and hares, but neither the wit nor courage to stitch that stubbly dangerous world into an important book. Congratulations!

Deaf Republic - A book everyone should read. If you haven't, do it now!

Hi @ailsamacpherson.bsky.social welcome to Bluesky - just what we had over our heads on our walk this morning in sunny bluesky Aberfeldy.

The Quakers are a really important & authentic voice for humanitarian values, have been for over 300 years. Unless the police had credible evidence that the Meeting House had been infiltrated by terrorists, this should be treated as an attack against religious freedom & peaceful protest.

Got this from @rosannamcglone.bsky.social ‘s book ‘The Making of a poem’. Sarah Holland-Batt, published in the UK by @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social , shows us what we could see for ourselves if we only knew where and how to look. Her insightful descriptive poems deserve to be hung in a gallery.

Really looking forward to this dropping through the letterbox

Quite right Rosanna this is exciting news. But what a mountain of work - she must be a glutton for it!

I don't often post about a book before I read it but I want to try to capture the frisson I feel when reading the opening pages of @sashadugdale.bsky.social 's The Strong Box which only yesterday morning she read to us at Stanza. It's exciting it's new - and it's familiar. Now, on with the book ..

I just get home from the Stanza poetry festival in St Andrews after an intensely rich poetry weekend and look whats in my letter box! Once poetry starts perhaps it never stops.

My last two years at school we had the Beano Album and A Hard Road and then along came Are You experienced. But it’s not Clapton, Green or Hendrix that turn me blue as I listen by chance to the Bluesbreakers playing All Your Love. It's this man and I know exactly what I’m missing.

Nothing prepared me for the last 5 poems in Audrey Molloy’s ‘The Important Things’. If you havn't already, please read it; be drawn in by the straightforward honest unravelling of her life’s tapestry which is a joy, sometimes wonderfully risque, always relatable. And then? Reader I wept.

The big poems in A God At The Door are not at all heavy because they are garnished with the magical light touch of a dancer. They are an absorbing joy to read, and to revisit over and over. Tishani Doshi is the 2nd find (after Isabel Galleymore) I came to via @planetpoetry.bsky.social Listen up!

This is a true delight. I bought and read his books in th 1970s but never heard him read. Now I have his voice and his pace I will read him again but differently.

Wherever light is spilled My cat will be found curled up in a puddle of white bedspread An off-white cat In pure white light Dreaming of heaven With one eye open

Warning to anyone (and you all should) buying this lovely book direct from @rosannamcglone.bsky.social - she is an enthusiastic and prolific master of sellotape so you need to put time aside for getting into the package! Loved the zoom launch Rosanna and am excited to read the book.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 12

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 11

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 10

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 9

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 8

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 7

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 6

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 5

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 4

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 3

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 3

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 2

If you peer at this book and flip it’s kaleidoscopic pages what flickers back at you from the darkness are cinematic, fantastic, sometimes Chaucerian images. The characters and their energetic stories will draw you back in over and over again. Beautifully produced by @saltpublishing.com

My thoughts are with his family of course, but somehow .... I'm less than 10 years younger and though I heard him read I never met him. Yet he was always a father figure. You've chosen the poem I would have chosen. I've been re-reading Angel Hill tonight.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. #BookSky #BookChallenge 1

This is exciting. As a life model, @lisadmkelly.bsky.social puts herself up there to be seen, sneezes, sweat, secretions and all. A deaf poet forces us to listen, carefully, to the white space (which makes a poem a poem) but also to the words that often lie on her pages like musical notations

I must have picked up Laura Bissell’s A-Z at an Scottish Poetry Library pamphlet fair and not read it. This week I have read it every morning, over and over. I love the rough bite of these sculpted, edgy poems. The tiny pamphlet is beautifully produced by Speculative Books. An all-round joy.

John Cage, master of the bon mot: ‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’

Happy to be led all over the place in the late sixties when I came to these two influential books over ten years after their mid-fifties publications. Now I find the Ginsberg hasn’t changed a bit but the Hughes is almost unrecognisable. Doesn’t seem like Hughes at all - I’ll have to re-read it.

Isabel talked about cuteness on @planetpoetry.bsky.social Researched at Disneyland this book moves from the frog sponge that will always love you to the extinction of the tree frog. All this from a cute wee girl who stripped her plastic doll naked and threw it on the shed roof. A great read.

"Winter was everywhere—what we did merely called attention to what we didn't do..." —Maureen Owen #poem #poems #poetry

Perthshire shepherds are miserable this morning

The cat's just settled on my knee. The cat hates to be disturbed. Someone ring the dentist and say I can't possibly come today.

Ordered on Thursday - Delivered to my door on Saturday. How do you do that @flyonthewallpress.bsky.social ? Thank-so much for my early Chrismas gift to myself.

This is from @theguardian.com covering species dependant on Brirtains vanishing rain forests. The mating ritual in which 'a couple suspend themselves from a tree in a sticky mucus to mate' sounds like something we could all enjoy