Unless    A novel by Carol Shields   She’s lost her middle daughter, or not lost – mislaid – or not mislaid but found on a street corner or not her daughter but her daughter’s outline, a cardboard sign around her neck inscribed with the word, Goodness.   I don’t recall the mother’s name, though I…

Sometimes I write a poem in response to a prompt. Other times, lines or ideas bubble up in my head when I am washing up or walking my dogs. Once I get a line, if there’s no automatic flow, I gather lots of sensory details around the subject until there comes a point when it feels ready to shape into a poem. This is a bit like catching a wary horse. You cannot just walk up to it. As a flight animal, walking directly at them makes you a threat, and they will run away snorting. You have to walk towards a horse in a curve, with your eyes averted. If you get close and the horse turns its head away, you reach for its shoulder or withers and give them a gentle scratch. Slowly, you work your way up their neck until they turn their head towards you.

The old white horse with nicotine teeth was tied up in the courtyard that summer. All day he stood on concrete. Head hung low in his halter, he rested one hindleg, then the other. The limestone wall lent him a roof for the morning, but as the day peeled back, the sun bore down on…

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For October, we are delighted to publish three new works by Tina Sederholm. The first of these, ‘Kill Your Speed: Working Farm‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month.   Kill Your Speed: Working Farm…

  Needing No Right to Roam: The Red Kite   rises as he hitchhikes a spiral of warm air; his driver is silent and he is carefree in the passenger seat.   Uplifted to the heights, he alights, gliding, black fingers splayed, his once hunched back, hoisting no pack, now stretched wide in flight.  …

Ask them if there has been some mistake. A curtain of rain drawn over a lake. They close the eyes of a shape on a bed. He was buried at the centre of a beautiful lake. Bulrushes are like damp eyelashes gathering dust that would muddy a lake. An oak tree steps out of a…

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For September, we are delighted to publish three new works by Toby Cotton. The first of these, ‘Summer on the Old Farm‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. Summer on the Old Farm Already…

The poem, ‘Somewhere we are fifteen, dancing at the pub disco‘ is a subject I keep returning to. Early close friendships I suppose, but also a set time and place, the 80’s, and a small market town in County Durham. As teenagers we were desperate to escape the small stifling town, where the future felt…

the   knock    knock   of the rent man all the sorry excuses not to pay never enough never enough   leaving in a hurry things we left behind the baby’s blue rabbit things broken in transit glasses    plates the porcelain figurine who lost her head   not sorry to see the back …

  Bernadette Steel sent out of mental maths to see Miss Arrowsmith too dumb to do sums and me sat at the front of the class Sister Francis scratching fractions on the board the numbers jumping around like frogs in the jars from biology earlier before the chloroform cotton wool ball dropped and that girl…

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For August, we are delighted to publish three new works by Rachel Burns. The first of these, ‘Somewhere we are fifteen, dancing at the pub disco‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month.    Somewhere…