Fran Lock has written several poems in response to the poems in the book above. Here is her introduction: About the poems It is not easy...

Josephine Balmer writes: "After hearing his nephew sing one of Sappho's lyric songs, the Athenian lawgiver Solon ordered the boy to teach...

As a bird As a bird, known only to myself intricate, small boned content to be held by the wind and write across the sky an unbroken...

Summer Rain Pluie d’été, or averse d’été. It depends on the weight of the raindrops on skin, how quickly they soak through to the heart....

Crossing My aunt she died a month ago and left me all her riches A feather bed, a wooden leg and a pair of calico breeches. (popular...

Void Father hanged himself perhaps above the washhouse mangle, or in the orchard maybe, dressed in apple blossom. You're wondering if I...

Author's note Baba Yaga is a witch from Slavic folktale. Sometimes seen as dangerous and violent, she is also a healer and a wise woman,...

Mornington Crescent Looking at the picture, you start to understand how  ghost presences can result from material decay.  That smudge of...

Reclaiming This runt-scrap of land. This pith of earth. Half-soil, half-salt, all howling sky. For now this silt's still ours. A concrete...

black coffee drunk cold I rehearsed the conversation we should have had what you would say what I would answer where it would happen what...

Sediments Architectural trees frame the skeletal canopy. Fell water fills leaf wells in itself and of itself a trickle down the woodland...

Stony Ground my vines grow best in stony ground, he tells me not fed too much, just sun and rain and a soil half-chalk, half-flint...

Photograph by Joanna Sedgwick To the Rescue Leave the village and you're soon amongst the curlews, their woodwind madness, the...

The 4 x 4 This fact that glides the tarmac road was once the showroom's glassy thought. Marketing states the factory makes these wheels...

Fat Gary "I could score from there", Fat Gary said. Then there he was, on goal, 40,000 screaming at him, Defenders hot on his heels. Fat...

Picture ©BenjaminSullivan Cherry Blossom The saddest spring of venomous breezes ominous clouds our red-letter days torn off unused our...

Grass At my mother's headstone is my father, wiping away with his handkerchief something like a black mark on the rock. The hell of it...

St. Michael's Churchyard (Autumn) Even on the calmest evening, when the trees stand mute and the leaves of ivy-covered graves are...

Magpie I am the magpie of broken things, I will not be contented with golden rings or silver spoons, I refuse to be blinded by the sunlit...

three for m i. the chandeliers after thirty years we finish each other's thoughts. we'll have the house to ourselves tonight, I said we...

Stepdaughter He taught me how to ride a bike without training wheels. First, how to brake, then how to glide, and nothing in-between. No...

Pinpricks False hopes are more dangerous than fears - J R R Tolkien I wish I could lose you like a wish from a bone, a button from my...

Photograph by Laura Veres Awakening It's still dark. The first sunrise after Creation could've been similar to the lights in the corridor...

Photograph by Brenda Clews On Arabia Mountain This cold sea of granite takes millennia to hoist a wave. Like music with notes spaced a...