Angela Graham introduces her trio of poems The Magi Remember by reflecting on the link between dreams, imagination and action. In the Christmas Nativity story, the Three Kings, far from being wise men, display astonishing political naivety. They congratulate Herod, the local supremo, on the arrival of a superpower and expect him to be thrilled…
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The Magi Remember / Angela Graham
Three poems for the season by Angela Graham: ‘Balthazar’, ‘Melchior’ and ‘Caspar’. Balthazar When the roads turned into streets and the streets to lanes and the lanes to alleys I became suspicious. I suspected … … something we had not prepared for. Our retinue had fallen more and more behind as…
Winter Readings: Raine Geoghegan
Raine Geoghegan reads her two poems from Issue Thirteen . ‘The Man I Thought was Welsh’ ‘My Father’s House’ Raine Geoghegan, M.A. is a Welsh born poet, prose writer and playwright of Romany descent. She is a Forward Prize, twice Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has been published online and…
Books of the Year 2022 / Part Four
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Jo Mazelis It seems I am always catching up with myself, so the books I read are often lagging behind the times. For example, in 2022 I finally read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark perhaps it was, by then, too late…
Winter Readings: Two Triolets by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch reads her two triolets from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd.
Winter Readings / ‘Philanthropy’ by Glyn Edwards, Jon Fowlds and Dan Trevithick
A film-poem based on a piece from Vertebrae, published by the Lonely Press.
Music by Jon Fowlds and Dan Trevithick.
Books of the Year 2022 / Part Two
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Three follows later this week. Livi Michael Manchester Uncanny is the fifth collection of short stories from master craftsman Nicholas Royle. As suggested by the title, all the stories are set in Manchester, although it is a Manchester made…
Books of the Year 2022 / Part One
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Two follows next week.
How I wrote ‘The Janitor is Crying in the Gents’’ / Natalie Ann Holborow
‘The Janitor is Crying in the Gents’’ emerged from long hours sitting in hospital waiting rooms and car parks, quietly observing life around me, largely ignoring the stack of dates magazines at my side. There are the amazing staff we see on the TV every day – the nurses and doctors, eyes crinkling into a…
Natalie Ann Holborow reads ‘The Janitor is Crying in the Gents’
Natalie Ann Holborow reads one of two new poems featured in Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. Find out how Natalie wrote the poem, here. Natalie Ann Holborow is the author of And Suddenly You Find Yourself and Small (Parthian) and co-author of The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass (Black Rabbit Press). She…
Read by the Author: ‘The Ladybirds’ by Katherine Duffy
Katherine Duffy reads The Ladybirds from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. Katherine Duffy lives in Ireland. Her poetry pamphlet Talking the Owl Away (Templar Poetry, 2018) received Templar’s Iota Shot Award. Two previous poetry collections were published by The Dedalus Press (Ireland). Her work was highly commended in the 2018 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Blue Nib, Skylight 47, Mediterranean Poetry, and in the anthologies The Word Ark (Dedalus Press, 2020) and Places of Poetry (Oneworld, 2020).
Read by the Author: Eleanor Hooker
Eleanor Hooker reads from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. The Lonely Crowd · Eleanor Hooker reads ‘The Girl With Bees In Her Eye’ Eleanor Hooker’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) and her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Holland) were published in 2021. A recipient of the Markievicz Award in 2021, her poetry book Where Memory Lies…
‘Dancing As Fast As I Can’ / Eleanor Hooker
Legion is a sequence of origin poems using the honeybee as a metaphor for the poet and a sting in childhood as the impetus to write. Michael Hartnett’s poem ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ is perhaps one of the best know origin poems by an Irish poet. The wrens settle on the young child in a feather necklet, marking him as a poet. This anointment caused the wrens to injure the young poet – Their talons left on me/scars not healed yet. Without subscribing to the notion of the tortured artist in this poem, Hartnett acknowledges, unsentimentally, that his craft arrived from an early wound. In his elegy to Yeats, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden wrote Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry/ Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. The idea of writing from a wound or a place of sorrow is not new and although disparaged as cliché, it resonates as a reality for many poets and writers, and to deny this fact is a form of silencing.‘Dancing as Fast as I Can’ is a poem that looks at the symbiotic relationship between the artist, their advocates and the ‘establishment’. It questions what these associations might entail for an artist and their artistic independence. The poem acknowledges that while most artists would like their work to be selected and advanced, not all are chosen, and perhaps a negative consequence of being absorbed into the hive is that the artist becomes managed, and looses their ability to produce beyond the constraints of that environment.
NEWS: Visions of Llandaff by John Freeman & Chris Humphrey
‘… I’m seeing things, but more than seeing is the feeling – the way the permeation of water through air under tall trees and taller spire creates a soft fellowship in which things, bloom and are tenderly magnified…’ The Lonely Press is proud to present, Visions of Llandaff, an exquisite collaboration between the poet John…