A lot of my work is nature themed, exploring and reflecting on ecocentrism. As a child, I spent hours drawing, writing and making things, collecting details even then from simply observing the minutiae of everything around me. This wandering (and wondering) through bluebells, city parks and woods with my father and later, on my own through fields, on beaches and through mountain heather, cemented an appreciation of what lives around, with, under and between us. In essence it’s acknowledging and respecting the interconnectedness of everything. I spent my early childhood in the English midlands and later in Greencastle, Donegal.

  My dreams are dark as peat. They’re fen and flush, hillock and hollow under orange glow. Pyres of wood scraps and tractor tyres sate the soot-black sky. Cut grass sugars the ring wormed gate. It crumbles to ash in my hands. Another gate is a mound of pheasant feathers. I cannot reach the field.…

You set off with a duck stance, feet snug in fins and an underwater camera strapped to your freckled brow. You turn with a double thumb gesture, then slip under like a cormorant. I abandon my book   marking the page with a razorshell sliver. I scan the water for splashing fins and a snorkel…

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For April, we are delighted to publish three new works by Lorraine Carey. The first of these, ‘A Year of Mountain’, is published today with two more poems and an accompanying essay to follow throughout the month.    A Year…

How on earth did it come to this, a state enshrined in a word he would never know,   wouldn’t even come to him on his walks to and from the Cribbwr Seam’s defiant face?   ‘Enshrined’ wouldn’t either, though she’d seen his finger with its arc of black dust glide   at random across…

Our Poet of the Month for March is Nigel Jarrett. Here, Jarrett discusses his approach to the creative process. It’s often easier to define what poetry is by adducing examples of what it isn’t, or what one believes it isn’t. According to Oxbridge MAs who taught the critic Hugh Kenner when he was a schoolboy…

Through the window and as still as a fist pulled and held in abeyance, the old pithead is an ink drawing beside her framed print of Klimt’s The Kiss and above that photo of the survivors he’d dragged from the roof fall, the matchstick props.   No-one mentioned what lay behind the icon, the history…

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For March, we are delighted to publish three new works by Nigel Jarrett. These poems are all meditations on the theme of marital disharmony. ‘Deluding the Hens’ is published today, with the next two poems to follow throughout the month.…

From beneath the cliff, a sudden din and these flattery-chatterers take off, thicken the channel with threads. A black lace veil lifts, swirls in the glare, risks scorched edges. From somewhere a cue to change tack. Flourish of a return. A wait. Then, with a phoosh they go again, a synchronicity of stretched spans widens…

I broke a dish today, a little blue dish just large enough to hold in the cupped palm of my hand.   The colour, soft aqua blue. A good colour, cool yet warm to receive yoghurt, soup, all kinds of pureed fruit.   I loved this dish not least because my son bought it for…