Please join me in congratulating poet, Rachel Deering, on the launch of In the Shadow of Gods, published by Black Bough Poetry.
‘Deering’s powerful chlorophyll- and clay-dipped collection shows us how to read the leaves and the ripples, how to speak with feathered and tree-abiding lives, to see, almost as if with the lightning rod of divine inspiration, that ‘it is always about love’. This is a book to surrender to. In the hands of a master word-conjurer, you will be carried by its ‘watermagic’. This is poetry as theophysics, rendered with the precision of a scientist and the furor of a visionary. A tremendous and vital collection from a breathtakingly skilled and assured voice.’ Chris Laoutaris, Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute and author of Bleed and See (Broken Sleep Books) and Shakespeare’s Book (William Collins).
‘Reflecting our journeys and departures, Deering’s imagery and language sings of the growth replicated within nature and humanity offering a reclamation of our landscapes through deft metaphor and an inventive perspective conveying the dangers and delights of daring to live within life’s contradictions. Each piece creates a sensory realm exploring our bodies and desires, our weaknesses and will for agency; the power of the feminine threads itself through each section with Deering’s inimitable ecological voice. And, while ‘everything has a conclusion,’ from these ends come beginnings – there is a true sense of hope vibrantly alive in these necessary poems.’ Louise Machen, award-nominated writer.
I’m delighted to introduce poet, Lawrence Moore, to Patricia’s Pen. Lawrence is sharing his poetry journey so without further ado, it’s over to him.
My Poetry Journey
Lawrence Moore
Hi, I’m Lawrence Moore and I’ve been writing poetry most of my life, but in 2018, I became more committed to the art of poeming, and have been rewarded with a series of friendships and adventures ever since. Perhaps my most distinctive creative trait is my love for musicality and flow. Meaning and self-expression are very important to me, but I often let the shaping of a poem be led by the sounds and rhythms that bring me most pleasure.
I often make use of crypticness and phrases with multiple interpretations, partly because it enables me to say things I might not otherwise be foolish enough to say, but also because I quite enjoy being mysterious. That said, I value candour highly and consider my poems to be rather accessible as poetry goes, because that’s what appeals to me as a reader.
In early 2022, I released my first chapbook Aerial Sweetshop with Alien Buddha Press. Dedicated to my late Dad, a passionate model aircraft enthusiast, it featured many flight themed poems. Moreover, I used the metaphor of flying to thread together various other subjects I wished to visit, a prevalent one of which was love. Along with hope, love is a matter never too far from my creative mind.
I began work on my next ‘big project’ in a similar way, this time weaving poems connected by adventure, misadventure, the natural world and the fantastical. Appropriately enough, they led me to TheBreadcrumb Trail, my first full length collection, produced by illustrator Jane Cornwell via Jane’s Studio Press.
This partnership has been immensely beneficial, with Jane immediately getting on my wavelength and weaving beautiful threads of her own to reinforce mine. The result is something more cohesive, and also more special to me, than I ever could have achieved on my own.
As I have said, it is a book of adventure and misadventure, of compliments and of juxtapositions, so I shall leave you with the following two poems, which I think give a hint of what lies in store, should you decide to wander the trail.
Buy a copy of The Breadcrumb Trail on the following links.
Lawrence Moore has lived in the coastal city of Portsmouth, England since birth and shares a house overlooking Kingston Cemetery with his husband Matthew and their nine mostly well behaved cats. A firm believer in environmentalism and animal welfare, he spent many teenage days involved in protesting and direct action. His poems have appeared in publications including Sarasvati, Feral, Fahmidan Journal, Green Ink Poetry, Dreich and The Madrigal. He previously released a debut chapbook, Aerial Sweetshop, with Alien Buddha Press in January 2022.
Back in 2015 after losing my Mum I embarked on an MA creative writing course to help overcome the huge void. As part of the MA our group was offered the chance to visit Bucharest and see how other MA creative writing students worked. Unfortunately not long after arriving I broke my hip. I’m sharing my story in the public domain for the first time on Fred’s Blog. Pop over HERE if you’d like to read it.
I’m delighted to introduce poet, Sue Finch, back to Patricia’s Pen. Sue is here to chat about her new release, Welcome to the Museumof a Life. Without further ado it’s over to Sue.
Welcome to the Museum of a Life
Sue Finch
Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about how my second collection, ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’, came into being.
I was eager to have a second collection of poetry almost as soon as the first one was finished. I kept a list of poems that I thought people would enjoy reading, but I was not entirely sure at first what was pulling these poems together.
When my poem, Museum of a Life, was published by Out on the Page in 2021, I recorded a reading of it and realised it was one of my favourite poems. It was written as a result of attending an Arvon online writing week with Caroline Bird and Richard Scott and I can clearly remember that wonderful feeling of being in the flow of writing when I was working on it. This is the original version of that poem which was then adapted for my book when I worked with Black Eyes Publishing UK.
MUSEUM OF A LIFE
Exhibit A: the bath where she was made to wash by her first lover.
Exhibit B: the shower where she was lime-soaped by her second.
Exhibit C: an unwritten postcard from Herm where she floated in the bay laughing with her third.
Exhibit D: dinner plate of sliced tomatoes kaleidoscoped with red onion rounds, drizzled in olive oil. Photo, France.
Exhibit E: white bread roll. origin, Las Vegas.
Exhibit F: Barcelona street map displayed here in the front pocket of the rucksack she wore against her breasts to minimise the risk from pickpockets.
Exhibit G-I: the green carnation, the dropped pound coin and the fucking hostile badge from the blind date with the woman who went on to become her wife.
Exhibit J: the stars she couldn’t believe she saw when she tipped the bucket chair back so much she fell and hit her head.
Exhibit K: the missed beat from the intro to the first dance at her wedding.
Exhibit L: 60-watt lightbulb previously inserted into her mouth while she pretended to be a lamp on a car journey back from Whitstable.
Exhibit M: the orgasm she had while watching Wendy James from the edge of the stage, Hammersmith Odeon, 1989.
Exhibit N: yellow sailing trousers and blue t-shirt from the Saturday night disco at Manchester Pride (year unrecorded).
Exhibit O: the kitchen counter she leant on to tell her Mum she was gay.
Exhibit P: her mum, who already knew, who had done for years and wondered why she hadn’t said it herself sooner.
Exhibit Q: snakebite and black from the bottom of her boots the night she danced with Chris’s girlfriend.
Exhibit R: two Dolly Parton backstage passes and associated Meet and Greet photos.
Exhibit S: a jar of Smurfs.
Exhibit T: Ronnie (cuddly toy and photogenic alter ego) purchased Chester Zoo, 2002.
Exhibit U-V: black velvet smoking jacket and size 10 jeans.
Exhibit W-Z: this space is reserved for future exhibits.
When I was little my brother would let me in to his museum for a small pocket money fee. I liked looking at the shells and fossils and interesting finds he had gathered together there in his attic bedroom. He knew stuff about the exhibits. I liked the way they were laid out and the textures and shapes. I also liked spending time in his company and finding out what was new. Amongst the sharks’ teeth I think there was also a large dinosaur tooth of some kind. I remember the shine of the fool’s gold and of the mercury which we rolled across the lino to one another.
I really like some housework jobs, but I dislike dusting. This means that I choose to put the peculiar things that I collect in jars on my shelves so they are easier to dust. One night in lockdown I had a vivid dream where a large jar was being delivered to the garden so that my wife could exhibit me in it. I wrote the poem ‘Jars’ based on this dream.
So there has definitely always been a part of me that is interested in exhibits. (Mind you I am also very interested in the tea room and the gift shop when I go out and about visiting exhibitions.) The idea of having my own museum of artefacts entertained me and I found I could picture the whole museum. Fortunately when I sent this manuscript to my editor and publisher they liked the idea and we were able to work on it together.
It was good fun to arrange the poems into five galleries and to picture a gift shop at the end where visitors could purchase blue apples, inflatable ladders and wind-up plastic pelicans as souvenirs. Having a clear idea for the overall structure of the book, allowed me to put aside poems that didn’t fit with the theme and focus on a specific order for the work. The gallery of dreams brings together some of my favourite poems that emerged during the nights of lockdown and I like the way they are showcased together. During this time I really enjoyed my writing and I would wake up and go straight to my desk to write something down because I didn’t want the vivid images that had been in my mind to evaporate.
Damien B Donnelly calls this collection Daliesque and says I do peculiar well. I’ll take that.
About Sue Finch
Sue Finch’s first poetry collection, ‘Magnifying Glass’, was published in 2020 with Black Eye Publishing UK, and her second full collection, ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’, is due to be published in Spring 2024. Her poems have also appeared in a number of online magazines. She loves the coast, peculiar things and the scent of ice-cream freezers. ‘Vortex Over Wave’ was published in 2023 and features a selection of her #ElasticBandPhotos and poems for the full moon.
Please join me in congratulating Sue Finch on the launch of Welcome to the Museumof a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK.
On entering this Museum of a Life, feel free to wander at will. However, don’t miss a single gallery, as every exhibit invokes a small part of the life of Sue Finch. By the time you leave the museum for the Gift Shop to buy a blue apple for a loved one, you will know her well.
Please join me in congratulating poet, Alison Lock, on the launch of her new poetry collection Thrift published by Palewell Press.
Melting Iceberg is included in Thrift
Alison Lock’s new collection, Thrift, grows out of a ‘communing in slow grief’ for the Earth and its vanishing creatures – an experience as painful as any personal bereavement. The collection’s poems are grouped into three sections: Rue, Thrift and Sage – herbal names that lead readers on a spiritual journey from despair through learning to be more frugal and sustainable to a new wisdom and potentially more hopeful future.
Travelling with Old Man’s Beard is included in Thrift
Please join me in congratulating poet, Paul Brookes, on the launch of his new collection, Wolf Eye Territory.
Wolf Eye Territory is about dispossession. How we become dispossessed of employment, livelihood, identity, nature, landscape and our own history. This is viewed through various means of seeing, and how our own actions, and those done to us change the world around us.
And here’s a little teaser from Wolf Eye Territory to get you in the mood
I’m delighted to introduce poet, Jane Dougherty, to Patricia’s Pen. Jane has recently published night horses. Find out more about Jane’s poetry and her latest collection.
night horses
Jane Dougherty
First I’d like to thank Patricia for inviting me to write something about what I do and why I do it. The occasion is the publication of my third poetry collection, night horses.
My first published poem, a poem about fog, was in the school magazine when I was eleven. I still remember the opening, and being irritated that the word ‘footfall’ had been changed to ‘football’ by some sixth form editor with the poetic sensitivity of a clam. I have never stopped writing poetry. My dad was a poet, published in literary journals, but essentially a poet who wrote, read his poems aloud to whoever wanted to listen, and didn’t care about finding an audience. I grew up with the idea that poetry, writing in general, was something that everyone did, just because. I still do really.
Six years ago we moved from the centre of Bordeaux to a very old, very uncomfortable tenant farmer’s cottage in a rural region of the south west. It sits on the side of a valley in two hectares of meadow that used to be pasture for four cows, with a vine, vegetable garden, fruit trees and a few pigs. After the last couple to live here grew too old to cope with livestock, the place gradually went back to nature. The proximity of nature and what it does if it’s left alone has been a revelation to me, given me a different and deeper perspective on my place in the world and the long path from past to future, where I come from. The quiet, the birds, trees, little rivers, the Garonne over the hill, have become my very circumscribed world, but far richer than anything I knew in the city.
In my poetry, I try to describe what I see and hear, to put it in the context of the bigger picture of destruction of the environment, changing weather patterns, fluctuations in the wild populations. It’s sensorial, emotional, and I hope, limpid. The quality I most value in poetry is beauty, words strung together to create something simply beautiful and beautifully simple. For me, a poem with no pearl at its heart is an unreconstructed clam.
The leitmotif for this collection is the night, terrible and tender, its voices and its silences, the remnants that linger in deep pools and dark places, the hush that follows the ferment of daylight, and the horses that gallop and graze the great starry plain that stretches from dusk to dawn.
I write ferociously, and as well as a mountain of unpublished poems, I have an even bigger mountain of unpublished novels. I have one coming out with Northodox Press next year, but that’s another story.
About Jane Dougherty
Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty’s poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone, Black Bough Poetry and The Storms Journal. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others, and her first adult novel will be published in 2025 by Northodox Press. She lives in southwest France and has published three collections of poetry, thicker than water,birds and other feathers and night horses.
Patricia M Osborne 