by Kobi Essah Ayensuo | Mar 21, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Helen Pletts translates work by Ma Yongbo 马永波 Wander around the Barren Mountain from Afternoon till Evening on the Sunny World Poetry Day Leaving the Dull Books Behind When you enter mountains, afternoons stretch and lengthen like days; mesmerise. You...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 20, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Trespasses Forgive me The E flat on your baby grand (not quite in tune). This same finger in the crack that goes clean through the bungalow’s supporting wall. Then flicking dust from the fringed edge of your floral lampshade. Noticing that they...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 19, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Seventy-one Things Paulie Should Know Farewell to the mountains, high-cover’d with snow, Farewell to the straths and green valleys below; Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods, Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. My...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 18, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
A Bad Spell The rowan by the house is cracked in two, her bark ragged, grown good-for-nothing old. Fungi feed haphazardly and once, a treecreeper, his heart of white running like love on her trunk. A calligraphy of twigs marks wind-spun air, frail...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 17, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Cousin I didn’t know who the call was about, just that it was past my proper bedtime on that surrogate school night, Sunday. I think the grownups had still been up because the landing light was lit for me and it would have been dark if they were...
by Helen Ivory | Mar 16, 2024 | Featured, Poetry
Islay: Your last holiday As he fixed scales in Port Askaig, paid in single malts and country charm, we loitered, impostors on an island farm. All at sea on a serenity of sheep, we played monopoly, box tatty and frail. Its missing chance cards, no...
