‘If Anais Nin and Shane Meadows met at a bar to write prose and poems it may well end up like this. An awareness of vulnerability is a strength that Hannah Teasdale expresses  with power and insight whilst creating an urban cinematographic vibe of working-class life without for one moment feeling sorry for itself…’

Antony R. Owen

Poem from ‘Indelicate Sundays’

The Weir

Let’s try our luck at getting lost

and step out into the slant-rain black

storm the path where rivers flood

and chip-wrappers, dog-shit and lichen

become one. Let us locate ourselves, or not,

by the water’s flow, upstream, from the bank

where his bloated body was found. They think

he didn’t mean to drown, local chitter-chatter hinting

he was pushed by a gang of needle-hungry tramps.

It’s a good story. I push down my jeans and squat, piss

behind the emergency life-float ring. Your clothing fades

into the middle of nowhere and my downstream disappears.

Also Published in ‘Interpreter’s House’ Issue 65

Adrian Buckner’s poetry collections are available from Five Leaves and Leafe Press, the latest being SeeSaw from Leafe.

Since retiring from teaching poetry and creative writing at Derby University, he has been grappling with the highly contestable idea of a purely lyrical poem, and attempting to write some.

The Ancient Sunbather

He’s not impressed by warnings

of a hole in the sky:

Six weeks and not a drop of rain;

he is back in a golden age

of summers possessed undimmed

in his ageing heart.

He lies in the parched land

like a die hard colonist

sticking it out in Delhi after ‘47,

making a go of the new Rhodesia –

unmoved by forebodings of a world

falling in, a setting sun.      


Rick Hall is a writer and consultant on the arts, creativity and learning, and the founder of Nottingham education charity, Ignite!. Now retired from Ignite!, Rick is a Visiting Fellow at NTU, and serves on the steering groups of Nottingham Civic Exchange, Creativity Collaboratives and the European Citizen Science Association.  A frequent visitor to Finland, Rick was Writer in Residence in the village of Koli in North Karelia in 2019. His current projects are research into children’s games and the A-Z of Community.  His poetry comprises occasional topical sonnets, and thankfully has never been published.

And a few lines from The Start of the Cricket Season

Cricket

I’m pleased to inform all chums in the States
That a new cricket season’s upon us;
While Tiger stalks lush greens at Augustus,
The next batsman in, in gloom sits and waits.

The crowd under blankets peers shivering,
His dog seeks ankles to worry and bite;
(Rage, rage against an appeal for bad light)
Like all hope, his sandwich is withering.

When drizzle to showers brings out the covers,
And dewdrops on cold noses become streams,
The scorer in his box muses and dreams,
‘Not a past-time for wild Latin lovers.’

In April, anticipation’s complete;
The sound of leather on willow is sweet.