by Kate Birch | Apr 12, 2026 | Picks of the Month
There is a wintry feel to our March shortlist. We feels its chill but are not frozen by it. And we look up! Which poem will you choose as your Pick of the Month? Alicia Byrne Keane, ‘Bureaucracies of Water’: the paradox of simultaneous presence and absence...
by Kate Birch | Mar 7, 2026 | News, Picks of the Month
succinct, modest, affecting portrait of a good but constrained life It takes great skill to make the ordinary extraordinary and the well observed and considered ‘At the Barbers’ by Stephen Chappell has done just that. It is for this reason and many more...
by Kate Birch | Feb 1, 2026 | News, Picks of the Month
A very striking and thought provoking piece of work. An evocative poem, powerful, visceral; a poem striking in its metaphors and nuances, with a strong sense of place – Plymouth and its Barbican area – and both past and present. (Two days after the poem was submitted...
by Kate Birch | Jan 19, 2026 | News, Picks of the Month
I love the whimsical way this develops like a slowly falling snowflake Snow may sometimes be an inconvenience and a bore, as many will have experienced this winter but it is also playful, wondrous and beautiful. And all too much in danger of disappearing. It is for...
by Kate Birch | Dec 8, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
I have lived this. I believe every woman from Iran who reads her words will feel every line of the poems she writes. Two powerful sentences that show why Mariam Saidan’s ‘A Cry’ is the IS&T Pick of the Month for November 2025. This is a...
by Kate Birch | Nov 16, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Beautiful, subtle merging of that moment of sporting destiny and the creative process Many talk of poetry in sport but few know that it is very often the subject of poetry and that poetry is perfectly placed to portray the tension, the exhilaration, the atmosphere,...
