Welcome to the Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry Archive
This archive is formed from all the posts from that original Ink Sweat & Tears website, it now consists of everything we have published up to the end of 2019. IS&T was founded by Salt author Charles Christian in 2007 as a platform for new poetry and short prose, and experimental work in digital media. Charles ran the site single-handedly, publishing new work every day till 2010, when now sole editor, poet and artist Helen Ivory came on board as Deputy Editor. The Ink Sweat & Tears website continues to run and can be found here.
You can either click on the poems below which run from most recent to oldest, or you can search for particular poem or poet, there is also a list of all the categories to click through. From Prose & Poetry to Words and Images, Haibun, Tanka, Haiku & Haiga, in addition we have all of the Poems of the month and Poetry picks, old blogs and news, award nominated, reviews and interviews.
Please do take a look.
Search the archive
Prose and poetry
Poems and prose published on the website from start to finish.
Ginny Darke
Lying to my Therapist I’m good. There’s a television channel selling me photocopiers and it makes me feel good. There’s a political crisis in the Maldives and I feel good. The...
Samuel Wilson-Fletcher
Night Out man stands drunk on the bridge leaning over the water like a streetlamp the light drops is scattered like gold coins on the black water a DNA double helix of gold...
Cliff Forshaw
Ice These days the permafrost is no such thing, breeds crooked shoots, springs fingers. Ancient hands reach out to us from ice through melting rings: our histories disinterred...
Rosie Jackson
The Ashmolean is Closed We’ve Skyped a few times, he’s a Quaker, seems sane, so I agree to a date, do Sudoku on the train, meet him at the station with a head full of numbers...
Nikki Fine
Cost Benefit Analysis Imagine walking into a deserted corridor without the fear of cobwebs catching in your hair or in your face. Imagine running a bath without the need to...
Sharon Phillips
Weather Forecast after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham That thin haze over the sun is made of ice crystals, a woman on the radio said as you dressed, cirrostratus nebulosus heralding...
Judi Walsh
Stone Let me look at your face in wonder, and hold it in my hands. Let me, with careful fingers, trace that noble nose, handsome and proud, which now can’t poke where it...
Frederick Pollack
The Job Time was privatized long ago. The firm that absorbed it, a major multicosmic, plans only to gut and chop and sell it off. Meanwhile, those images you see among our...
Alwyn Marriage
Ghosts dry rot, damp and musty airlessness conjure up ghosts that even dogs can see drifts of blue under green leaves bear a whiff of young romance in maytime long ago sunlit...
Stephen Kingsnorth
Rows A strange condition for a row amongst the headstone rows that flank the hill side cemetery, that hangs and flows, marble chips and chips off marble, chip paper, scree of...
Poetry Picks
Our favourite poems and ‘best of’ chosen from each month between 2007 and 2019
Gemma Harland
Possession You have stolen my ears and filled my mouth with ash. My hands and feet are your servants running errands through shifting labyrinths, according to your whim. On every cell of my body your name is stamped. You have buried my feelings in...
Alex Josephy
Therapy Take thistledown, hold it in the bowl of your palms. Feel it tingle like Spumante. No, it can’t mend your heart, but it will float you to the surface of your skin. A cure for that dull ache under the ribs, that beats each time you long for...
Emma Baines
Vital Signs We laughed, in spite of the darkness, at the circles around your eyes. and you rolled them over hand-knitted hats in the chemo ward, to cover things we tried to hide. when I shaved your head and the last of your hair fell in your lap, you...
Your Pick of the Month for March is this fine Word & Image offering from Helen Pletts and Romit Berger!
Helen Pletts has been working collaboratively with Romit Berger since 2012 and that these wonderful Word & Image pieces have been published exclusively by IS&T makes it fitting that, having been shortlisted before, they are voted as Pick of the Month...
Michéle Beck
Siblings I can remember raw eggs sat sweating in cups dried scabs splitting into islands, as we banged together our knees under the table He was the older one but I the fiercer Holes kicked through cheap chipboard, the door’s tantrum-keepsakes....
Matthew Friday
3 Swans Arrive in Prague They arrive clothed in April keenness, three Valkyries, a cloudy V made for smaller birds. They fly across the face of the National Theatre: golden spikes, a winged charioteer and reeling horses, frozen in jealous bronze....
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga reviously published on the website.
Greg Mackie
Haiku * A frenzy of flies shimmer in the dying sun - odour of apples * First light of spring - he runs to his destiny and slips on melting snow Greg Mackie is a poet, a dreamer, and a self-confessed idiot. He is addicted to...
Stephen W. Leslie
Did You Drop Something? In my twenties I worked at a food co-op bakery in Minneapolis. This was back during the peak of the hippy days. I had long curly hair and a beard. We were areal odd mixture of people. There were draft dodgers, people wanted...
Virginie Colline
Five Haiku laundry day raindrops drying along the spider’s line the cat under the bush spying on a sparrow a none-of-your-business glance at a loss for words a distant honk ends my sentence ***************** grey clouds the...
Ali Znaidi
Five Haiku Wind wipes out the soil. Tiger sheds its skin—spotless Tiger Lilies fade. ♦ summer fruits abound two bunches of grapes protrude her sassy earrings ♦ pebbles in the pond scarring the face of water a broken mirror ♦ rain rain rain...
Virginie Colline
Four Haiku the bride bites into a rosebud flight of white napkins in the breeze * Arabian dream a sandarac tear captures the sun * moonlit Paris the glimmering scales of the sea monster * after the storm she cracked her door he held his breath Virginie...
Four haiku from Todd Grant
fog rolls along the moorsa chilly night in SussexMrs.Woolf's library *grandpa's old watchfound in a dresser drawerit's been 1:30 pm forever *night time silenceone car passes bythe crickets stop chirping *the bleakness of winterwatching the...
12 Days of Christmas
All the poems from our regular 12 days of Christmas feature.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas we bring you Ralph Monday and Bethany W Pope
Holy Theotokos Save Us In the cathedral empty of true feeling, the icons are beautifully silent: blue and green hues, golden halos, the choir in perfect harmonies taking us across time, space, to the beginning days when the naming began, where we...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas we bring you Derek Adams and Julie Maclean
The Devil Makes Work The bouncing bomb Superball missed the enemy Action Man, the day after Boxing Day, to snap a scarlet leaf from Mum’s poinsettia. Sap bubbled from the break white as PVA adhesive. Hiding the leaf, I wiped away the evidence,...
On the Fourth Day of Christmas we bring you Katherine Stansfield and Reuben Woolley
No room at the inn All the animals in the animal basket wanted to go: Stegosaurus, polar bears, Lego dog. We let in a camel and a donkey only on sufferance. They watched from the back, blocked by pandas. The crib was crammed:...
On the Third Day of Christmas we bring you Lesley Quayle and Sally Long
Christmas Morning - Wharfedale. We had to travel early along deserted lanes, the mist a gauzy cloth on fields and river, light thawing, promising little but a milky drift. Ghost trees harnessed the fell, frost rigged, quicksilvered, cutwork on the iron...
On the Second Day of Christmas we bring you Gill McEvoy and Jinny Fisher
Travellers A high price to pay at their journey’s end, they travelled a long way; he on foot, she on a mule and she heavy with child. All doors were closed against them. No welcome anywhere. And the night bitterly cold. There are others travelling now,...
On the First Day of Chrismas we bring you James Parris and Catherine Ayres
The Alchemist The house was strange without one. Corners where it could be swelled daily in their emptiness and threatened to topple the festivity. Contrary under her gaze, he determined that a squat bought thing just wouldn’t do, and, shedding...
Words & Images
Words with images previously published on the website.
IS&T’s salute to the Jubilee Weekend from Helen Ivory
Helen Ivory’s word and image boxes juxtapose found and cast objects with phrases unearthed from the Arthur Mee Encyclopedias. Her fourth Bloodaxe collection Waiting for Bluebeard is due next year. http://www.helenivory.co.uk/. ...
Helen Pletts & Romit Berger
Cirkus I can't understand the clown but the red looks beautiful - gold braid bitten into the fibres. The lion tamers (ticket collectors on Sundays) have fallen under the...
Yu-Han Chao
Black Kitty from Across the Street The archetypal black cat, perfect, green eyes gleaming in the dark, so black he forms cat-shaped negative space in the day, and at night simply disappears. Walks right into neighbor’s homes like Shin Chan, pissing everybody off. He...
Word & Image from Pletts and Berger
Luna As a white moon rising-round there in the tooth of down drowning; my seal-eyes weightless in the nurse’s face my nightdress holds the jellied rice which cannot ride the spoon. Words by Helen Pletts whose two collections, Bottle bank and...
In the throes of NaPoWriMo, Ira Lightman seizes the carp…
Ira Lightman makes public art in the North East (the Spennymoor Letters, the Prudhoe Glade, the Gatesheads) and lately Willenhall and Southampton. He devises visual poetry forms and then asks local communities to supply words that will bring them...
yu chengyou
*Poem extract by Helen Pletts whose two collections, Bottle bank and For the chiding dove, are both published by YWO/Legend Press (supported by The Arts Council) and available on Amazon. ‘Bottle bank’ was longlisted for The Bridport Poetry Prize 2006, under...
Blogs and news
Blogs and archived news from 2007 to 2020.
And the IS&T ‘Pick of the Month’ for February 2016 is Patri Wright’s ‘It Starts with Her Awkward Hairline’
We are now very pleased to announce that the Pick of the Month for February 2016 is 'It Starts with Her Awkward...
January 2016 Pick of the Month
It's that time again: Voting is now open for the Pick of the Month – your favourite poem – for January 2016 Our...
December 2015 ‘Pick of the Month’
ONE LAST HOLIDAY TREAT. Voting is now open for the Pick of the Month – your favourite poem - for...
Reviews
Archived reviews from 2007 to 2020.
Richard Hawtree reviews ‘Gerry Sweeney’s Mammy’ by Dónall Dempsey
This is a book of great clarity. Its poems draw strength from the twin securities of family and place...
Konstandinos Mahoney reviews ‘Sunshine at the end of the world’ by Chris Hardy
Sunshine at the end of the world, Chris Hardy’s fine fourth collection, has time hanging over the forty...
Neil Young reviews ‘The Nagasaki Elder’ by Antony Owen
Antony Owen’s fifth collection, The Nagasaki Elder (V Press), is one of those compelling slim volumes...
Interviews
Archived interviews from 2007 to 2020.
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.