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.
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Prose and poetry
Poems and prose published on the website from start to finish.
Anna Maria Mickiewicz
The Hidden Once they were hidden Forest covered the fear Drowned out the silence... Darkness stood on the way home The clock of the heart was beating in seconds Dash up there...
Penny Sharman
Nightjar I want to be a Nightjar where language is colour where my ways of being cryptic and crepuscular are accepted like stars in night skies. I wish I was a Nightjar could...
J V Birch
Moon daisies Do you know about the daisies that only open in moonlight? Have you seen the attic full of sadness and when the tallest of us fall? And then the questions to which...
Lesley Quayle
Cracked When people say your skull cracks like an egg, it doesn’t. Not the Humpty Dumpty fragmentation - compared to that, it’s unspectacular. A sound like a dropped watermelon, the...
Rachael Clyne
I cradle my grief I cradle my grief sing it lullabies keen with it roar with it hide it write it speak it sing it It keeps coming back in waves each time rising each time deeper...
Nicky Phillips
Afterwards That very last night at my parents’ house it was as though a blackbird waited on the fence and, watching, saw my tears, flew down, pecked into the crack, opening, its...
Martin Figura for Remembrance Day
Bear for Stewart Harris Betrayal will happily walk with you, knows your patterns, the roof-runs and dead ends of conflict. Conflict will lift you skyward, then lay you down on...
2017 Pamphlet Commission Competition Co-Winner: Jo Young on Remembrance Sunday
from Firing Pins Lost Things: Afghanistan (i-vii) (iii) Insomnia The heartbeat of the thrice-nightly Chinook a lullaby not you tonight...
2017 Pamphlet Commission Competition Co-Winner: Gail McConnell
From Fothermather An Apple Seed apple cup & shell I say these things to you I read them from the book book book this...
Peter Daniels
Moments of Vision The ultrafuturistic train glides in, and the station crystallises round it, sparkling marble and sky blue daylight. We glide out, the track beneath us...
Poetry Picks
Our favourite poems and ‘best of’ chosen from each month between 2007 and 2019
Brian Rihlmann
Brick by Brick how tough a wall you can build from bubbles they stack like bricks and solidify into something you couldn’t break with a sledgehammer when you pick up the phone the words are fewer harder dripping not flowing a sponge wrung to its...
Aishwarya Raghu is our Pick of the Month Poet for August 2019
You might think it strange that 'A Poem about Frost' should be the Pick of the Month for the height of summer but Aishwarya Raghu's 'profound' 'melancholy' and 'beautiful' poem took voters beyond nature and winter and there was something about its peaceful isolation...
Helen Kay
NIMBY and the Supermoon 2018 The window by her pillow has the best job in the house: it sneaks in day to kiss her awake to a tail-thumping heart. Curtains slice a piece of sky, twig-flecked, let her taste the creamy dawn shame it’s...
Setareh Ebrahimi
Galloping Horses We caught a moment of your underwater world. Galloping horses, the midwife said. In there there’s weird fishes and a submarine with a rotating light looking for life steadily; beep, beep, beep. You like to hide. At first on screen...
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 from broken land. Revenants with their bronze-age seeds, knapped...
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 doesn’t belong. Let me stroke those silky eyelids with my thumbs. I will try...
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga reviously published on the website.
Steve Black
* a life in boxes the memories her daughters fought over priced to clear in the last hour of the car boot sale * this moment of clarity a dying star burns itself out surrenders to the void behind the gas works * since the misunderstanding in marks and...
Charles Tarlton
TIME, GENTLEMEN, TIME CARMODY: We ought not take too long describing the winds or the leaves that dance along them. Ah. BLIGHT: What the older man knows. That’s my objective. Then you tell the truth, when you shift your...
Deborah P Kolodji
* long nights of political discussions the sun anyway * rocky shore blunt tentacles of a green surf anemone * spring concert blossoms blown from the trumpet tree * sheltering roots of the old oak box turtle dreams * restaurant receipts the bitterness of...
Jane Wilkinson
Your location Round the corner I hear you coming I hear you coming round the corner of the barn I arrange my arms and legs I hear around the corner of the barn the gravel’s tough back teeth working doggedly on splintering a bone I spin up a cloud of smoke to be...
Craig W. Steele
* unimpressed by the garden fence fog * howling winds— politicians promises blow farther from truth * lunch beneath a maple turkey vultures circle above us! When not writing poetry, Craig W. Steele is a professor of...
David J Kelly
is, was, will be There was a man who used to stand at that corner in Hyde Park, when the speakers weren’t proselytising. He’d hang around for hours, occasionally clearing his throat. I only heard him speak the once, when he asked me the time. At...
12 Days of Christmas
All the poems from our regular 12 days of Christmas feature.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas, we bring you Pat Edwards, Marc Woodward, Alison Binney
Mary and Joseph I saw them in two bottles of cleaning product, with a stripy cloth thrown over their heads. I saw them in a swirling cloud formation, streaks of white and grey becoming figures. I saw them in the frozen patterns of leaves,...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas we bring you Marie-Louise Eyres, Belinda Rimmer, Andrea Holck
Limbs and leaves Escaping the dry heat of the house we step into the mild, Boxing Day damp. Our noses fill with the sweet stench of silage and fallen fruits at the end of the garden. Lying beneath bare trees, a brightly coloured...
On the Fourth Day of Christmas we bring you Laura McKee, Amlanjyoti Goswami, Gareth Writer-Davies
Since it was all about a son I ask my son now that he doesn’t really believe in everything what’s Christmas all about then? I mean what does it mean to you? there is still a hole in the roof to follow a star through but we have just...
On the Third Day of Christmas, we bring you Maggie Butt, Mark Fiddes, Catherine Ayres
Choosing the Tree We diary-match till everyone is free. In scarves and gloves and hope we mobilise for yearly quest to find the perfect tree. Two factions, both alike in certainty: one favours sculptural, the...
On the Second Day of Christmas, we bring you Anne Bailey, Mick Corrigan, and Helen Pletts & Romit Berger
Round Robin The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow, and what will the Robin do then? James played his first piano piece in public In June we lost our much loved cat David has done less flying this year...
On the First Day of Christmas, we bring you Madelaine Smith, Joanne Key, and Caroline Hammond
The First Christmas away from home you invite me as family; more used to a summer celebration I brave the weather to join you. Fingers of cold inch through layers, pinch ears in unkind clasps, bring tears to my...
Words & Images
Words with images previously published on the website.
Word & Image from IS&T Editor Helen Ivory’s ‘Hear What the Moon Told Me’ launching tonight
Forty colour plates in 45 pages with the text, as Graham Rawle puts it, ‘carefully teased from long-forgotten books and reconstructed with serendipitous aplomb’. A true celebration of the poetico-visual, Helen Ivory’s ‘Hear What the Moon Told Me’ is...
Word & Image from Marina Shiderova and Tom Phillips
A tree in the forest Below Sredna Gora the bus stops at a garage. Families without faces, without...
Colin Campbell Robinson
Noir The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here. Italo Calvino. ‘Invisible Cities’. The proof is in the text. He manipulates keys. They hold plastic close, electronic skipping....
Beth Phillips
Beth Phillips is an emerging writer who dabbles in documentary, illustration, poetry and short prose. Keen to expose her work to a hungry audience she explores and examines themes of older age, decay and the beauty within these. Twitter: Beth Phillips@bethclaudiap
Rob Stuart
A Concrete Cinematography Primer Rob Stuart is a media studies lecturer, filmmaker and light verse enthusiast living in Surrey. In addition to Ink, Sweat and Tears he has contributed poems to Light (USA), Lighten Up Online, Magma, New Statesman, The Oldie, The...
Daniel Lehan
Daniel Lehan: Former paperboy, choirboy, shop assistant, ice cream seller, chip shop manager, petrol pump attendant, pub caterer, post office worker, theatre usher, cleaner, leaflet distributor,...
Blogs and news
Blogs and archived news from 2007 to 2020.
August Pick of the Month Time and You’ll Need to Act Fast!
It's a busy September for us with the deadline for our Pamphlet Commission Competition approaching on the 22nd...
And the Pick of the Month for June 2017 is Angelica Krikler’s ‘Nature’
Out of the mouths of babes. Angelica Krikler, who wrote and submitted her poem 'Nature' when she was 16, streaked...
We’ve got ‘Your location’ by Jane Wilkinson as our Pick of the Month for May 2017
A definitive vote (unlike another significant, recent election) saw Jane Wilkinson's 'Your location' chosen as...
Reviews
Archived reviews from 2007 to 2020.
Wendy Klein reviews ‘Chagall’s Circus’ by William Bedford.
Chagall’s Circus is set out in five sections with poems alternating between pristine tercets that give...
Claire Booker reviews Joolz Sparkes and Hilaire’s collection ‘London Undercurrents’
For five years, Hilaire and Joolz Sparkes have been on a mission to excavate the hidden histories of...
Alison Graham reviews ‘While I Yet Live’ by Gboyega Odubanjo
While I Yet Live begins sudden and bold; the speaker of ‘Obit.’ Announcing i will die in...
Interviews
Archived interviews from 2007 to 2020.
What makes writers tick – Tamar Yoseloff answers IS&T's questions
Seven QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process.1. Where do you...
Clare Pollard talks to IS&T about her writing process
Seven QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process.1. Where do you...
Esther Morgan talks to IS&T about her process
Nine QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.1. Where...