New Walk 10Thank you to all of our subscribers for helping us to reach this milestone tenth issue. The magazine survives – and thrives – because of your support, and that of our contributors.

New poems by Isabel Bermudez, Nicholas Murray, Matthew Sweeney, Lisa Kelly, Carol Rumens, Alan Jenkins, John Greening, Emma Lee, and many others. Grevel Lindop on W. D. Snodgrass. Philip Morre on John Ashbery’s French translations. Stunning artwork from Gurminder Sikand, William Jackson, Michael Kurtz and Miguel Ivorra. We celebrate tenth issue with a feature on ‘the perils of being a poetry reviewer’, with contributions from Clare Pollard, Jeremy Noel-Tod, William Logan, Carol Rumens, Robert Potts, David Wheatley and other of our leading poetry critics and editors. This is supported by our customarily incisive and opinionated reviews section. Oh, and a good deal more besides. Postage FREE worldwide – order yours here!

If you haven’t seen the wonderful new on-line magazine The Compass yet, I do hope you can find time to check it out. There’s work by brilliant poets such as Liz Berry, Helen Mort and Julia Copus as well as poems by newer poets such as Siegfried Baber, who was a featured poet on this blog a while ago, and a whole range of intriguing and engrossing pieces by poets I haven’t heard of before. There’s also a selection of reviews, two by friends of mine, Maria Taylor and John Foggin, and one from me of  Jane Clarke’s ‘The River’ (Bloodaxe), ‘Loop of Jade’ (Chatto and Windus) by Sarah Howe, and ‘The Art of Scratching’ (Bloodaxe) by Shazea Quaraishi.  It’s great to be involved with such a finely produced and carefully edited magazine.
If  you’d like to read a longer version of my review of Jane Clarke’s wonderful collection ‘The…

Cold fingers undo the laces
one last time, thick mud
pulled away, stud marked
to the changing room floor.

How exciting it is to announce to the world that a poetry book has just been published (absolutely yesterday) and especially this one: Alison Hill’s Sisters in Spitfires which appears on the Featured Writer page.  Such a fantastic and intriguing subject is bound to be a wow of a best-seller and in Alison’s hands it is indeed a fire-cracker. Sisters in Spitfirescelebrates the women who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during the Second World War. They flew Anything to Anywhere – from Tiger Moths to Wellingtons and four-engine bombers – but shared a particular love of the iconic Spitfire. There were 164 women of the 1,246 ATA aircrew, including four female engineers, from over 25 countries. Pilots had no instruments or radios and were at the mercy of the British weather and enemy aircraft, often ferrying several planes each day.

And here’s what the reviewers have already said about it:

“Alison’s beautiful poetry…

It must seem that Paragram has been very quiet in the few weeks since we announced our Chapbook Challenge winner and Spotlights poets… but nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s final proof time – arguably the busiest time in the Paragram year. This is when the successful poets get to see their creations on the page and we at Paragram have to make sure that everything is as close to perfect as humanly possible.

Every task must be treated with care, patience and an eagle eye, to ensure the Paragram anthology ‘Spotlights’ is a volume which will make both Paragram and the contributing poets proud.

Apart from this buzz of activity, one of the very pleasant elements of running a competition, is that Paragram gets to spend time with some excellent writers and thoroughly nice people. Peter Taylor, the winner of the Paragram Chapbook Challenge meets both these criteria, and he met…

In 2009, the year in which I discovered there were magazines in the UK and Ireland specifically publishing poetry, I also stumbled upon the wide world of UK-based poetry competitions.

I found the website the Poetry Kit   and entered one or two. I had beginners luck that year, having a poem come third in the Ledbury poetry competition, as well as poems placed in a couple of smaller comps. I was simultaneously making my first exciting forays into submitting to poetry magazines. I’ve always done both- that is submitted to a few competitions and quite a few magazines.

I didn’t (and still don’t) have any strategy for which poems I send where. People talk about the ‘competition poem’ but I’m still not sure what this is, and though I will sometimes read the winners, I don’t study the results to try to assess what type of work is being given prizes…

I’m pleased to announce our six Pushcart Prize nominations for Three Drops from a Cauldron this year!

Witches’ Market by Kathryn King (from the Samhain Special 2015, Part One)
Circe Sonnet by Robert de Born
The hare by Rebecca Gethin
Hansel & Gretel by David J. Costello
The Tigress of Cachtice by Nikki Robson
In Wolf’s Kitchen by Wild Soft (forthcoming on the webzine in November)

As always, it was difficult to choose because the standard was high, and I could’ve easily nominated twenty poems… so well done to every Three Drops poet for making the choosing difficult, and congrats to our final six!