Monthly Archives: June 2021

This poem by Society member Steve Walter was selected for Folio #74, published in 2020

Crime

My Dad was a policeman.
My Dad was a poet.
My Dad was a policeman-poet.

The set homework that night
was to write my first poem that rhymed.
Dad taught me rhythm, taught me rhyme.

He came up with murder:

He banged her head
Against the wall
And then stood back
To watch her fall.

Imagine my relief
when I learnt that poems
don’t have to rhyme at all.

We are delighted to welcome impressive poet David Morley as our guest on Tuesday, June 15th. We are still on Zoom, maybe not for much longer! The meeting begins at 8.00pm and will start with an Open Mic. We hope you will join us in a celebration of David’s poetry and poetry in general.

David Morley is a poet and ecologist. He won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems, the judges commenting, ‘Ted Hughes wrote about the natural magical and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor’.

His Carcanet collections include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings. He co-edited The New Poetry for Bloodaxe Books, edited The Gift: New Writing for the NHS, and Carcanet published his edition of Charles Tomlinson’s Selected Poems.

He is known, too, for his poetry installations within natural landscapes: ‘slow poetry’ sculptures and I-Cast poetry films; and he has served as a judge for several literary prizes such as the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Foyle Young Poets.

David wrote the bestselling The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing. His podcasts on creative writing have been some of the most successful in their field. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University.

David is a winner of a Cholmondeley Award and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Whet your appetite on the internet – there are lots of fascinating reviews, poems and readings to introduce you to David’s poetry if you have not met him before.

See you soon!

This poem by Society member Steve Walter was selected for Folio #74, published in 2020

Cityscape

All summer, falling in love with the city
as if it were dying…

Autumn, and you have slept
through the echo of sirens

half-aware of buildings hundreds of years old,
of vaulted stone, cathedrals breathing,

reflections in shop windows, of him
threading his way through your skin.

Bucks Fizz for breakfast, thick pile carpet
between your toes, before

lunch at The Ivy, passing by empty coffee cups
held out for coins.

Your secrets left in the bedroom,
climbing to the moon,

the muffled rush of traffic, Westminster Abbey,
royalty beneath flagstones,

the shift of populations – their story
plays, until the needle hits the label, and scrapes.