‘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.