Welcome to the Chainlink Magazine Archive Chainlink Magazine ran from May to December 2025 and was an attempt by Neil Fulwood and Shaun Belcher to do something different in poetry magazine terms….
Category: POETRY
REVIEW: Airtins: Socialism, Scots and the Tao Te Ching by William Hershaw (Culture Matters) – Neil Fulwood
A word on the title. Airtins doesn’t mean metallic food or drink containers which have become airborne or – emptied of their contents – now hold only air. Airtins is a Scots…
Martin Hayes – Four Poems
Disneyland, Paris the CEO has told the supervisorsthat they need to find outwho it waswho while in the lift with the potential new clientssaid, ‘here we goup to Mickey Mouse land again’and…
Robert Etty – Four Poems
ORGAN RECITAL A heart can beat only so many times,Jane’s dentist announces, probing her gum,and, while it’s in mind, lists other organsnone of us ought to take for granted. Jane and her…
DEEP ART: A Q&A WITH ANTHONY HOWELL
CHAINLINK: On the spine of your book-length poem Autumn, where the publisher’s name and/or logo would usually be, it says “Manubook”, which I take to mean a manuscript presented bound and with…
REVIEW: Autumn by Anthony Howell (Manubook) – Neil Fulwood
It would be erroneous – and stupid – to say that cracking the spine on Anthony Howell’s Autumn is as daunting as settling down (or, equally, squaring up) to The Odyssey or…
Ruth Shelton: Three seasonal poems
In the Beginning Star begins the songbreaking her strings from untimed waitingagitating the void, calling along constellations, grazing unknown suns.Chords gather, surge with the tides, grating,rattling the shore, breaking into runs to…
REVIEW: Full Body Reclaim by Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves) – Neil Fulwood
An established figure on the East Midlands literary scene as one half (with Birgit Friedrich) of the poetry collective Dandelions, Caroline Stancer makes her publishing debut with Full Body Reclaim, a handsomely…
OWEN GALLAGHER – THREE POEMS
‘BATMAN AND BATWOMAN ROB THE POUNDSTRETCHER STORE!’ We could set up a graffiti school,get commissions from gangs, let students practicein the basement car park before allocating billboards, churches, banks. We could start…
Caroline Stancer – Three Poems
WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE When I visit I walk throughcorridors created by everything from your mother’s flat(she was a hoarder too). The sealed boxesare draped with clothes,empty cans, takeaway containers full of…
ANDY CROFT’S ESCAPE TO MORIBUNDIA: AN EXCERPT
Forthcoming from Broken Sleep in 2027, Andy Croft’s Escape to Moribundia is a verse-novel in Pushkin sonnets. A black comedy about the colonisation of the Future, a study in Hauntology and a…
Neil Fulwood: Two Poems
DIET This is where I am right now, feeling likeI’m in some loose-limbed American poemby one of those hard-living American poets.Mentioning no names, but … those poets,who casually toss their cookiesin the…
LEAFE PRESS: Alan Baker your guide.
LEAFE PRESS Leafe Press publishes poetry, mainly of the modernist / post-modernist variety. It’s a 21st century press and a digital press; it was founded in April 2000 with a launch at…
ROSS WILSON: THREE POEMS
The Great Stink ‘But the Dragon was loose at the time . . .No one had challenged him lately . . .He got to our part of the world; nobody saw him…
ANTHONY OWEN: POEM ‘Hurricane Benjamin’
In the heart of a stolen starWe are back to wigwams againNames on limbs just incase it comesHurricane Benjamin destroyer of tents,Destroyer of children and whole bloodlines. Fuck it, lets get back…
ANGELA TOPPING: THREE POEMS
REGRETS He likes to see the faint blue smokestream into darkness as he says farewell.He relishes the paper’s acceptance of flame:a mystic kiss from tender whispered match. He stuffs in remnants of…
ALAN MORRISON ON THE ALDERBANK WADE
(Adapted from the Preface to The Alderbank Wade) I first developed a fascination with the political and religious nuances surrounding the English Civil War, or as it is termed in Marxian historicism, the English Revolution, and…
REVIEW: The Alderbank Wade by Alan Morrison (Culture Matters) – Neil Fulwood
Read any good verse novels lately? Personally, I can’t think of anything truly outstanding in that most challenging of verse forms since Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, published seven years ago, and Anne…
THE ARMITAGE STOMP (Revisited)
This post originally brought together some thoughts I posted online in response to the attention being given a negative review posted on the Stride website by poet and critic Martin Stannard of…
Brett Evans: Three Poems
Argument for Devolved Media in Cymru And we finish our tour of Conwy Castlein the Cunt’s Tower; here’s Rod Liddletied to a chair. That bloodied rag now gagsa toothless mouth and broken…