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.

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

read more

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...

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.

Words & Images

Words with images previously published on the website.

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.

Reviews

Archived reviews from 2007 to 2020.

Interviews

Archived interviews from 2007 to 2020.