Survivor

It’s always a fine line,
come the reckoning time
for the slow and weak to be picked off the herd;
while we, still in the race
to stay out of bottom place,
can kid ourselves they got what they deserved.

They were finally caught out
for all that loafing about
while we in the warm will trample each other.
Because I’m alright Jack,
I’ve got my own back;
and I’m just fast enough to use you for cover.

I’m safe in the middle,
but they’re on the fiddle,
while that poor chap couldn’t have been keener.
I’ll be sad to see him gone,
but he was never very strong;
you see, my friends and I, we voted Hyena.

Harry Gallagher co-founded and co-runs The Stanza, a monthly poetry night in Newcastle. He gigs regularly across the North and his poetry has been published widely. In 2014 he co-authored “Dark…

Exit Poll Wetherspoons

He is the Trafford and Hulme CAMRA guy
I like drinking and writing poetry
They do fell-running at weekends
She is a manager, best job she’s ever had
She has a beehive hairdo, she’s in a Supremes
tribute act, they made it to the States last year,
they’re planning to go back.
He took his kids to Eurodisney,
they were just the right age

The photo-memorials
of hardened drinkers
no longer with us
the crumpled faces
consolation

We should work more
We should work less
There’s always the lottery

She’s going to the pictures, she’s treating herself
He’s putting all his old football shirts
on ebay – under duress
He hasn’t spoken to him in over two years
as far as he’s concerned they
inhabit different countries

Ben Willems lives in Manchester and has been writing poetry for over 10 years, a lot of it performance-based. His work has…

(For Borno,Nigeria)

Another miscarriage has
betided her woes in the
womb of the oracles

Earth grandiose dusk
has swallowed light
And inundated our hamlet
with spoils of gory throes

We are now the bisected navel
of a dying chronicle; a testament hurled
to the whistling wind

For our progenitors sack of semen
has dried like arid deserts-
geriatric barrenness

And our virgins
Are now concubines
of turban tieing carnivores

(for elephants in central Africa)

They, Poachers,
slaughter us — the large ones.
They put us in a basket
and herald nomenclatures of zest.

We are a generation
sold to the partial god of greed;

Wirra!
A sacrifice to appease
his famished progeny,extinction.

For blisters of woes
have been tattooed
on the nucleus of our dynasty.

And the foetus of our grace
has kicked the bucket
in the infirmary of salvation.

Help us. Please.

The Educational Psychologist puts it in context
to a room full of teachers. He defines the complex
problem of children, disordered and unruly.
I raise my hand, ‘Please Sir –
would you have judged me so shrewdly?’

What would you have seen in that kooky, choosy,
screwy, fruity, moody, loony teen?
What would I have been if you put me in a box
and tried to unlock the paradox
of this disruptive chatterbox?

A genius with Aspergers, or ADHD,
oppositional defiant, with a conduct disability.
A strong willed drama diva,
with ‘how to behave’ amnesia?

Each day I went home with
a general adaptation syndrome
and a touch of hyper-mania.
It gets even more insania ….
Little impulse control.
Malingering manic episodes.
Post traumatic embitterment.
Rationally belligerent.
Seasonal adjustment.
Rebellion deliberate.

And transient global amnesia to boot.
When I was fifteen I wasn’t that cute.

Would you have had the…

Poop-Poop!
(written when Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education; after Kenneth Grahame)

The world has seen great villains,
And villainous schemes they have wove,
But never a bloke on whose name we choke
Compared with that of Gove!

The clever coves at Oxford
To logic and facts have clove,
Yet they none of them think that they’re half as bright
As talentless Mr Gove!

The MPs sat in the House and lied,
And a palace of lies they wove;
But who’s as dishonest as he is dim?
Egregious Michael Gove!

The teachers sat in their schools and wept
As to finish their marking they strove.
Who was it changed the syllabus?
Guess! It was Mr Gove.

The Goddess of Education
Sits in her library grove .
She cries, ‘Look! who’s that hideous chap?’
We answer: ‘Michael Gove!’

The schools are all dreadfully injured,
For an idiot over them…

Hi Jane. Firstly, I’d like to congratulate you on the success of Nine Arches Press. You’ve managed to publish a steady stream of poetry collections as well as Under The Radar magazine, and Nine Arches also contributes to the poetry scene in the midlands and beyond with excellent events such as the regular Shindig! readings.  You’ve also been the first publisher in residence at a poetry festival, and Nine Arches is receiving some well deserved attention, winning a Sabotage award for most innovative publisher last year and recent high profile reviews in the Guardian and elsewhere.

 When did you first have the idea to set up an independent press and did you model Nine Arches on any other publishers? Did you seek advice from established presses when setting out?

I was working for another small publisher at the time. As that post finished, it just seemed like there was a lot of great, unpublished…

It’s hard to write about a garden. From a Western standpoint, there’s no escaping the long shadow of Eden and original sin. Even outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, the major world religions all have the trope of the garden as paradise: a place of escape and revelation. This persists in a post-Industrial Revolution culture which fetishes the pastoral.

If the garden bears the weight of our expectations, the writer has to negotiate this burden. Poetry of place needs to be about more than description, however accomplished; it is also about people in relation to the place. When I arrived at Riverhill, I read Abegail’s poem, ‘How to Walk in the Garden’. Her approach is to adopt a beguilingly didactic tone, assuming the role of guide. The first line of the poem pulls us in: “Here’s the key to the garden”, and the imperatives continue, both inviting and commanding us to “Squander…