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.
John Grey
Image Sidewalks are silent, dark. Is that you? Details are fogged over but there's something about the shape, the walk. What are you doing in this neighborhood anyhow? Are you...
Beth McDonough
After Kirrie We sat-nav under cloud, which might or might not burn off, adder our way up Glen Isla. Through the churchless conundrum of Kirkton of Kingoldrum let's...
Helen Calcutt
A conversation with my daughter about my brother’s suicide She is awake. The moon is bright and the clouds have parted. The trees are painted trees, living a still life. She...
Kym Deyn
Homeopathy for Spinsters I. About the Weather People ask about the weather but mean other things. All of it, I say, all of it is about to break. My dreams come and go like...
Kenneth Pobo
Migration At the club you wear a bold orange shirt and purple pants. I stay in and pop corn. Hot kernels dance in the pot. The moon wears a bright red headband. It too...
Veronica Aaronson
I am the Prevaricator I’m distracted clearing Granny’s house. I don’t see the sprig of barbed wire sprouting with weeds in the garden. It rips my dress from pocket to hem. For weeks...
Michael Bloor
Auntie Pam's Postcard Dear Kylie, Saw this in the motorway services - I know you like pandas. You’d be expecting a card from Scotland, but we’ve only got as far as Doncaster –...
Kate Noakes
Pure Brilliant Ultra A long time ago there was queen and her king who lived in Pure Brilliant Ultra. Their land was made of Ash, Chalk and Wishbone their palace Cool with Jade,...
Jack Andrew Lenton
Blubberer "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding...
William Thompson
Styx A felt-tip pushing back the skin. Spotlights. The high-pitched wailing of a sternal drill. Latex gloves, polyester gauze, brute strength. Then the ribcage lurching wide to...
Poetry Picks
Our favourite poems and ‘best of’ chosen from each month between 2007 and 2019
Gregory Kearns
Perfume Stranger, you smell like my dead dad. I have a cloud of weepy nostalgia for whatever perfume you have bought and wear. Stranger, what is this scent called? If I’d had to guess I would say it smells of lilies, but I don’t know what lilies...
Paul Grant
When to stop eating chalk I am watching my niece Draw on the back door step With chalk Squiggles Almost shapes Almost something Going forward I will have no advice To give her About all of this About anything really Hopefully she'll have the good...
William Stephenson
On the Origin of Electrofunk by Natural Selection Our fingers sprouted claws; our foreheads, feelers. Wires shook and gourds boomed in our hands, paws, podia. We danced in spirals, bees on acid house: this rising buzz for louder, this spiral that...
Chrissy Banks
If you don’t come back I will turn to the woods. To winter woods trees rising above their heap of leaves. I’ll turn to the hills that endure rain, flood, fog, snow and storm the worst winds and fires of full sun. I will follow the river that keeps on...
Tom Bennett’s ‘Travelling Light’ is the Pick of the Month for June 2019!
It was the superb imagery, the hypnotic rhythm, the sense of mystery and the way Tom Bennett painted 'an incredible picture of an ordinary scene' that caught the imaginations of voters and saw 'Travelling Light' as the IS&T Pick of the Month for June 2019. This...
Jack Little
The Metro After 1AM Each station marks an anonymous arrival. Behind screens, each tunnel descent is metal cold and hot air, cutting deeper into the Earth bright lights blinking on the city’s last bend before the volcanic rock, the lake bed, the...
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga
Haibun, Tanka, Haiku, & Haiga reviously published on the website.
Sonam Chhoki
No substitute for this Late monsoon. The tea bushes in the lowland plantation form a verdant edge to Bagdogra airport on the Indo-Bhutan border. I am on a flight to New Delhi. A young man, his hair gelled and spiked, sits next to me. He asks to...
Richard Stevenson
* Departure Bay: cumulo nimbi won’t take a hint (Nanaimo, BC) * Departure Bay – the rooster tail trail of a small speed boat * Emily Carr House – even the bees wipe their feet at each blossom porch * horse and buggy tour – a satellite dish aimed...
Angelee Deodhar
Segue Our fast train stops just outside the station. On the abandoned weed littered railway track, smoke strands from a sadhu’s chulha drift past a sinking sun. A chorus of mynahs joins the cacophony of crows. The cantonment junction where my dad, a doctor in...
Wayne F. Burke
* spasmodic second hand of the clock on the wall of the doctor's waiting room * walking along the beach my sore feet-- the moon wrapped in gauze * another email from Olive Garden-- what does she want now? ...
E. Martin Pedersen
* in Candyland where everything’s candy the winners get vegetables * at the politician’s funeral you had to push your way in * your delicious perfume gave me a migraine that never ended * all my adult life I have waited for the word: malignant *...
Sonam Chhoki
The Meeting A gaunt figure, head bent, face obscured, walks through the withered grass at the edge of the field. I don’t know why I think it’s a he. The measured stride seems to suggest a certain sense of purpose. Where is he bound for, through our overgrown land? And...
12 Days of Christmas
All the poems from our regular 12 days of Christmas feature.
On the Sixth Day of Christmas we bring you David Van-Cauter, Seth Crook and Laura McKee
Snowgrip The snow has come my car wedged in its inches of icing pockmarked with bird tracks Under blanket and dressing gown I watch others graft with shovels enabling my escape They scrape away cold scraps hack at raw earth I feel friction in the...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas we bring you Ali Whitelock, Jane Burn and Nicola Slee
the cumquats of christmas past you hailed your taxi tuesday the eight–– eenth of february 2014 at four twenty seven p.m. i watched it approach swerve to the kerb its back doors fly open––if this was death i saw it crouched behind the wheel & jaded as...
On the Fourth Day of Christmas we bring you Alwyn Marriage, Megan Pattie and Jenny Hill
Sensing the stable New-born eyes don’t focus for a while, but warmed by the breath of animals and the love of a young girl, the baby gradually became aware of a cow that woke him when she lowed, a donkey nibbling straw, the breeze whispering through the door to ruffle...
On the Third Day of Christmas we bring you Nikhil Nath, John Paul Davies and Maggie Mackay
Growing gifts A church spire pricks the dull sky and it starts snowing birds have gone into hiding, the flowers will wait till spring, the milkman finds his, a thankless job and the snowman is forced outdoors while the coniferous comes indoors...
On the Second Day of Christmas we bring you Carole Bromley, Stuart Pickford and Pauline Rowe
Boar’s Head We were passing through Borley and I was thinking, as I changed gear to go up the hill, woods either side, of the wild boars that lived there and gave it its name and whether there are still boars there and, if so, how big they might...
On the First Day of Christmas we bring you Gareth Writer Davies, Gillian Mellor and Joanne Key
Christmas Lights after Anne Sexton Santa is turning on the Christmas lights I am waiting for my diagnosis crowds have gathered on the memorial green for the white explosion of light with a ho-ho-ho baritone Santa thumps down the switch God I will try...
Words & Images
Words with images previously published on the website.
Rob Stuart
A Heap of Broken Images After T.S. Eliot and Robert Smithson Rob Stuart is a media studies lecturer, filmmaker and light verse enthusiast living in Surrey. In addition to Ink, Sweat and Tears he has...
Chris Guidon
Chris Guidon is a confessional artist and poet from Kidderminster. Like a snake he needs sunshine to live.
Word and Image from Michaela Ridgway
Love is the sea I cling to you, my arms around your neck; let the water take the weight, you tell me....
Painting by Jason Howgate, Poem by Winston H. Plowes
The Invisible Banquet Sip on the sun, trapped under the bridge poached and runny as an egg. Chew on the beech leaves red, plump and leathery like tomatoes, sun dried and clinging to...
Julie Maclean
Simpson dingo girl safe inside your canvas dreaming of the red track westward across the dunes the lean shape-shifter with toes of a dancer foxtrots the fringe camp...
C. Albert
Love is a common word. Don't let your jaded mind forget its purest derivations. 1. A topiary forest, home of a hungry paradise, a rotund heaven. 2. The round rind bed on which a baby roundling sleeps blanketed in ove leaves. 3. Without umbrella for...
Blogs and news
Blogs and archived news from 2007 to 2020.
And January’s Pick of the Month is ‘Waiting’ by Rachael Smart
When we published our latest shortlist, we noted that it looked to the displaced and the vulnerable so it is perhaps...
Our final Picks for 2016: Elisabeth Sennitt Clough and John Mackie
We take one last lingering look back to 2016 with our final 'picks' for the year. Both Christmas poems, they affected...
Christian Wethered’s ‘Blade’ is our Pick of the Month for November
Maybe it was the sense of speed, the need to leave it all behind and yet remain 'weirdly still in the centre',...
Reviews
Archived reviews from 2007 to 2020.
Alan Price reviews ‘The Space Between Us’ by Neil Elder
The poetry of Neil Elder has a compelling domestic surface. By surface I don’t mean superficial. By domestic I...
James Roderick Burns reviews ‘The Man Who Wasn’t Ever Here’ by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
‘The Man Who Wasn’t Ever Here’ begins with a useful scene-setting in prose, and a mystery – perhaps...
Rosie Jackson reviews ‘In Her Shambles’ by Elizabeth Parker
This is a book of translucencies. Nothing is over-solid or overstated, nothing prosaic, yet the poems have an...
Interviews
Archived interviews from 2007 to 2020.
What makes writers tick – Michelle McGrane answers IS&T's questions
Nine QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.1.Where...
What makes writers tick – Novelist Sarah Bower answers IS&T's questions
Nine QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.1. Where...
What makes writers tick – David Morley answers IS&T's questions
Nine QuestionsIn this series Ink Sweat & Tears talks to practicing writers about their process and craft.1. Where...