Author: Matthew Paul

stone pine— a golf buggy skirts the parched fairway horse chestnut shade the tiptoes buck stretches to pilfer leaves no room on the Thames for swans to sprint into flight— loosestrife and tansy

I have two poems on the sun-drenched Odyssey poetry website today: one new one, part of a sequence responding to the life and work of Edward Burra; and one from my collection.

There is a new batch of reviews up on Sphinx, among which are no less than three excellent reviews of Richie McCaffery’s new pamphlet, First Hare, and my review of Ben Ray's New Poets’ Prize-winning pamphlet, The Kindness of the Eel. As ever, Sphinx is a tremendous resource for anyone looking for new poetry pamphlets.

Here are some of my summer haiku from over the years:   summer sales a Caravaggio chalked on the kerb * heat haze a tangerine milk float jumping the lights * summer fete the Punch and Judy man losing his voices * school’s out the riverbank flush with tansy florets * behind the long pebble… Continue reading Some summer haiku →

Over on her entertaining blog, Heather Moulson has afforded me the honour of interviewing me, in her inimitable fashion. A word about Heather and her poetry: many times in the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to see and hear Heather read, often from memory, her poems about life in the 1970s ; they are… Continue reading Interview with Heather Moulson →

Some distinguished contributors, notably Julie Mellor, have already reflected, via blogs and other social media, on the Calder Valley Poetry anthology, When All This is Over, conceived by John Foggin. Here are some further thoughts of my own. I’ve said previously that it was a brilliantly simple idea, to ask poets to respond to Eiléan… Continue reading When All This is Over again →

You may wonder if I haven’t got better things to do than write this post, but I have a bugbear to get off my chest. In these days of trouble, when so many people are being laid off and when the economy looks set to tank even further, we all have to make financial choices… Continue reading On gratitude to certain publishers →

My thanks to Neil Richards for posting a poem of mine on the Poetry in Surrey Libraries website. It’s a response of sorts to Liz Berry’s poem ‘5th Dudley Girl Guides’, from her collection Black Country. Amongst other recent posts are excellent poems by Write Out Loud Woking co-hosts Greg Freeman and Rodney Wood.

I’m delighted that Fokkina McDonnell has featured four poems of mine on her excellent blog. There is a lot of good stuff among Fokkina’s previous posts, not least her own wonderful poems.

Over on his ever-excellent blog, John Foggin recently revealed the names of the poets behind the 26 ‘When All This is Over’ poems chosen, out of 80 or so which were submitted, for publication in a Calder Valley Poetry pamphlet. Like many great ideas, this project has a perfect simplicity to it, and it has… Continue reading John Foggin’s ‘When All This is Over’ project →