The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For October, we are delighted to publish three new works by Michelle Penn. The first of these, ‘I’m arranging angels on the head of a pin‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. I’m arranging…
(In 1938 a group of hunger marchers entered the Palm Court at the Ritz Hotel.)
I was at a loss.
I’d just given a couple celebrating their silver wedding
a silver teapot of Oolong.
The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For September, we are delighted to publish three new works by Chrissie Gittins. The first of these, ‘The Islands of the Bahamas’, is published today with more poems to follow throughout the month.
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.
In the prison yard burst footballs still trapped in barbed wire, a grey watchtower still against the winter steel sky above the visiting room where his rough lips give way when we kiss pushing the loneliness down. At night cries ripple through the landing; I shut my eyes, dream of outside. My girl:…
‘Daughter, Frizzante (In Padova)’ In my candy-floss mind where everything sticks: our fingers are entwined, your plump baby hand still curled tightly around my hair. These days our rushed goodbyes push us to let go, bid farewell to the mess of childhood and the hot smothering of raw motherhood. What sticky…
The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For July, we are delighted to publish new work by Shauna Gilligan. ‘Self-Butchery in Two Parts’ is published today with another new poem to follow on Sunday.
Absence The town lies baked in dust and dejection; today belongs to the ant masters of the chemical trail. I walk, feeling as though I’ve lost someone and not knowing where to find them. An ugly harmless lizard lies by a fence, tongue flickering in blue primordial patience while a dog barks its warning…
S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish
origin and now lives in Dublin. His collection The Colour of
Extinction (Renard Press, October 2024) was The Observer Poetry Book
of the Month. An Ocean Called Hope (Downingfield Press, May 2025) is
forthcoming. His poetry has been published in more than a hundred
magazines around the world. He has been highly commended in the
Erbacce Prize and nominated for Best of the Net. He has very recently
given readings at the Waterford Gallery of Art, Ardgillan Castle and
Notre Dame University.
‘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.
The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish new work by S.C. Flynn. ‘Uploading the Impossible’ is published today with another poem to follow on Sunday.
Listen to our Poet of the Month, John Freeman, read ‘Little Dancer, Fourteen’. You can also read the poem below. The Lonely Crowd · ‘Little Dancer’, Fourteen’ by John Freeman A particular young girl at ballet class adopts the classic pose she has been trained in, head up, shoulders back, arms down behind her,…
I’d heard the words before, but I shall hear them forever, or what passes for forever in human life, and as I’ve heard them now for years, as Peppino said them, with a ponderousness which was disarming if you chose to find it so, as we did, his friends, his fellow-students and I, the tutor,…
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