Jan Swann

      Ladybird, Ladybird After Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes You seem very far from home and who would after all choose a grit pocked pavement to languish on when they could be eating aphids in my overgrown garden? Mother Mary isn’t coming my way it seems...

Gwen Sayers

      Her Funeral Clouds spit on the coffin, wring oily rags, splash a woman, her violin cased in sunken purple. I wade with the others through the mud clench, she’s beyond now, until the weight of her. My eyes hide behind dark. Damp pallbearers lower...
Chris Hardy on Quentin Cowdry

Chris Hardy on Quentin Cowdry

  CLOSE -UP Quentin Cowdry Hedgehog Poetry Press 2025 ISBN 978-1-916830-47-9 This pamphlet of twenty-two poems won a Hedgehog Press first pamphlet competition in 2023. The poems are carefully structured in regular stanzas, with well-paced, rhythmical lines and...

Dave Wynne-Jones

      Sonnet And did she break your heart? A woman asks, perhaps imagining A fallen chalice scattering Fragments about the tiles, only discovered Days later in corners underfoot. But there was no suddenness More a growing sense of doom A shrivelling of...

Simon Maddrell

      Bringing Pilates to Attention Four years in Knockaloe was a living inspiration for inventor Joseph Pilates. His self-contained exercise in mental- physical health spawned a method which he called Contrology — corrective drills grown within the...