By The Lonely Crowd

In Conversation with Nigel Jarrett / Cath Barton

Welsh writer Nigel Jarrett is a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize and the Templar Prize, both for short fiction. He’s published nine books, two of them poetry collections. His latest book of poetry, Gwyriad, is published by the Welsh independent, Cockatrice. Nation.Cymru said its poems rewarded close reading by their ‘ingenuity and range of cultural allusions’, while Acumen magazine remarked on the collection’s ‘perceptive meditations on many of the key moments of human existence, expressed with humour and insight’. Cath Barton met Jarrett to discuss the collection and his approach to the creative process

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Where Poems Come From and Where I Want Them To Go / Tony Curtis

In Darkness in the City of Light, there’s a poem in the narrative called ‘Taking Line 5, January 1945’, where one of the disappeared men comes back to Paris. The Germans took a million and a half Frenchmen away – I didn’t know that – and the survivors dribbled back and they were broken. At first, people didn’t want to look at them, they didn’t want to look at their own defeat. In the Metro carriage, it takes a while for a woman to get up to give him her seat – but then everyone finally acknowledges he’s there.

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Poet of the Month, June: John Freeman

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For June, we are delighted to publish three new poems by John Freeman. The first of these, ‘Experience at Merthyr Mawr’, is published today with two more to follow over subsequent weekends. The accompanying photographs are by Peter Sedgwick, who…

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Ritual Glitch by Morgan L. Ventura

A child uncovers an effigy of the rain god. They drive their shovel down into its head.
Hairline cracks
pour down Cocijo’s face, trembling tears, as screams from the kitchen signal fire.
Tonight dinner is smoke.

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‘Eschatology’ by Morgan L. Ventura

The mountain swooned in its strangeness, storm above pink in celestial tension.   How I’d like to be buried here, I thought, unsteady but rooted in natural chaos.   To have spent a lifetime trying to control it, taming passions and longings,   feuding with ecstatic idiocy.   To know love might transcend elements, cut…

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Noticing Things / Jackie Gorman

The three poems I have in the latest edition of The Lonely Crowd share little in common in terms of themes but they do share a common thread in the natural world and noticing things. For me, the natural world has always been an important source of inspiration, and I think for all poets and writers noticing things is a vital skill. What writing poetry has taught me more than anything else is that no experience, no piece of reading, no moment is wasted. Years later or sometimes decades later you’ll sit down to write a poem, and a memory or image will pop up as though it is asking to be noticed and written. Anytime this happens I am both surprised and comforted that so many memories of experiences and things I’ve read and seen are waiting for just the right time to be written. Like a seed growing in the dark, waiting for the right conditions for it to sprout and burst through the soil towards the light and into life.

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Poet of the Month (May): Morgan L. Ventura

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For May, we are delighted to publish three new works by Morgan L. Ventura. The first of these, ‘Desert Talk’, is published today with two more poems to follow at the weekend. You can also listen to Morgan read the…

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‘A Jab of Truth’ by Mary Morrissy

‘Mature People’ comes from my recently published collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision. It could well have been the title of the entire collection since the overarching theme is the experience of late middle-age reckoning; the backward glance on life, love and the whole damned thing.

Some of the action of ‘Mature People’ takes place in Trinity College Dublin – so there’s also a sly echo of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in the title. However, this is Normal People for oldies.

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‘Knowing No Division’ by Mary O’Donnell

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about tenderness: what it was for me, how it has affected my life, and how I might inhabit it as best I can for the remainder of my life. There is less life to be lived now than before, so tenderness was a term that enabled me to look back as if telescopically and isolate certain moments I now see might be called moments of ‘tenderness’. Suddenly I was seeing tenderness everywhere. It deferred a new authority on my inner life. All the things I had thought about, reflected on, through moments of happiness and moments of disaster, could be pulled out of their tight casement and seen for what they were: the simplest moments of tenderness.

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REVIEW: ‘Fourth & Walnut’ by Jeremy Over

Nigel Jarrett Fourth & Walnut Jeremy Over (Carcanet, £12.99) Ah, words! Don’t you love them? Jeremy Over does. Silence and its thoughts too, its imaginative wanderings in which words fill spaces. He plays with words, even when they belong to others. One might call his playfulness ‘linguistic subversion’. He has fun with Rilke, not an…

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‘The Resurrection of the Lord’ by P. C. Evans

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish three new works by P. C. Evans. The last of these, ‘The Resurrection of the Lord‘, is published today. The accompanying photographs are by the photographer and artist, David Street. The Resurrection of…

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‘The Deathwatch-Beetle Serenade’ by P. C. Evans

The Deathwatch-Beetle Serenade

Christa’s uploaded some photos of us to the net.

It’s thirty years, and you still make me catch my breath,

Nicky. Sometimes I forget who we were or are,

Working the red-light strip from the Torenzicht Hotel to the Banana Bar.

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Read by the Author: ‘Take Away’ by Alan McCormick

Alan McCormick lives in Wicklow. He’s a trustee of the stroke charity InterAct Stroke Support, who employ actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.

As well as The Lonely Crowd, his writing has featured in many publications, including Best British Short Stories, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Exacting Clam, Confingo, Popshot, Poetry Bus and Sonder; and online at Dead Drunk Dublin, Époque Press, Books Ireland, 3:AM Magazine, Fictive Dream, Trasna and Words for the Wild. His story ‘Fire Starter’ came second in 2022’s RTÉ Francis MacManus Story Competition, and ‘Boys on Film’ was runner up in 2023’s Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize. His story collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, which included flash pieces illustrated by the artist Jonny Voss, was longlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. He’s recently completed his second story collection and a book of memoir essays with the assistance of an Irish Arts Council Literature Award.

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