My poems showcased here in this inspiring place are both typical, and, of what I write. I penned poetry prolifically from about the age of nine until my early twenties and then suddenly, once accepted onto the novel stream of a Creative Writing MA, everything I wrote was prose fiction (or shopping lists). I managed one sentimental poem after the birth of my son, and then, around ten years later the glimmer reappeared and I can’t stop pursuing it.
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.
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…
Our February Poet of the Month reflects on the composition of her piece, ‘Wolf Moon’. Interesting to come back and close read this poem. Written a year ago, it could have been written in the last couple of weeks: same place, same focus, same me. This makes me smile, not least because the poem concludes …
I was a documentary maker for decades – images and truth my daily concerns in the business of representing the lives of other people. The three poems in my Poet of the Month feature appear in my new collection, Exposure: war, media, democracy. The book responds to journalistic reports of conflicts – the first half, Soldiers and Civilians engages with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel / Gaza war; the second, Citizens and Politicians with the operation of democracy, its institutions, its weaknesses and the crucial issue of how the individual can participate.
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Two follows next week.
For some time before I wrote ‘Joy’, I’d been having strange feelings. I didn’t know what to make of them, or how to explain them. They occurred in bouts a few times a year. They were blasts of intense, untethered happiness, often ambushing me in very mundane settings. Ironically, they made me feel a little lonely afterwards, as I couldn’t think of anyone I could talk to about them who wouldn’t find me loopy. So, I kept quiet. Eventually, I confided in my husband, who listened, and told me he didn’t experience such things. I expect he thought I was loopy.
The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For November, we are delighted to publish three new works by Brian Kirk. Here, Brian discusses the creative process behind these new poems. In early 2023 I wrote a short poem about a family from a child’s point of view.…
Our Poet of the Month for August is Shauna Gilligan. Here she discusses the creative process behind the three poems we have published throughout the month.
‘Trompe l’Oeil’ also starts with an old object, in this case a piece of embroidery that will be framed to make a fire screen. I have one like this a peacock on silk that screens the fireplace in my sitting room. The one in the attic that I keep meaning to ‘do something with’ has a piece of tapestry featuring a huntsman in a red coat. I love the combination of skills in fire screens; woodwork, glazing, sewing and the way they show us what can be achieved with left-overs, remnants, scraps. I wanted to create something that paid tribute to that and that echoed how I think poetry often functions, taking fragments and cast offs to create something that covers and comforts a gaping open hearth and heart.
Cath Barton on the creative process behind ‘A Suitable Feast’ from Issue 14. You can also listen to Barton read the story below. My story ‘A Suitable Feast’ was essentially a response to my anxiety during the COVID pandemic. When Italy was locked down in early March 2020 I had no idea that would happen…
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
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.
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.