Glyn Edwards reads two poems from Vertebrae, his acclaimed debut collection from The Lonely Press. You can order Vertebrae here. The book is distributed in the UK by the Welsh Books Council.
publishers of fiction, poetry & photography
From Poetry
Winter Readings: Three Poems by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
Our Winter Readings series continues with Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal reading her three poems from Issue 11 of The Lonely Crowd. See the website tomorrow for an essay by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal. Image by Jo Mazelis.
Winter Readings: Three Poems by John Freeman
John Freeman reads his three poems from Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. John Freeman is a prize-winning poet and critic whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies over several decades. His most recent books are What Possessed Me (Worple Press), and Strata Smith and the Anthropocene (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), both published…
Books of the Year 2019 / Part Four
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick the best books that they have read this year. Jaki McCarrick My reading in 2019 was disparate and strange. At night I mostly read fiction, some novels I had already read or missed classics or works published a few years previously. During the day, I read books I’d been asked to review, much…
Books of the Year 2019 / Part Three
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick the best books that they have read this year. Lisa Harding When I was gifted the much-hyped bestseller Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, I was sceptical. The grandiose claims that this a ‘once-in-a generation book’, that it is a ‘masterpiece’,’ astonishing’, ‘compelling’, an ‘instant classic’ made me weary and wary, and yes, prone…
Books of the Year 2019 / Part Two
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick the best books that they have read this year. Jo Mazelis Around January of this year I began writing and researching a novel set in London in the 1970s. My research was varied, covering everything from music, history, politics and subculture. One of the key books, A Hero For High Times by Ian…
Books of the Year 2019 / Part One
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick the best books that they have read this year. Mary Morrissy Maybe because I’m far advanced into the writing of a novel, I’ve found myself reading a lot of non-fiction this year, and reluctant memoirists, in particular, it would seem. As a result, all of these writers seem to write slant about personal…
On Writing ‘Town Talking’ / Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards discusses his four new poems in Issue Eleven. John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For a poet, it’s often the case that a poem is what happens when you’re doing something else. Poems have a terrible habit of leaping out at you when you’re…
Composition Notes: boggled, distraced … / Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin discusses her two poems in Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. ‘Distraced’ I have an ever-growing pile of poems that have been generated by mishearings, misreadings or mis-spellings of words. I find I often have a different interpretation of the fractions that make up words, in sound or on the page, to those…
Writing ‘Summer’ and ‘Victims’ / Natalie Crick
Natalie Crick discusses the writing process behind her poems in Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. In my poetry I tend to write about lonely places with stark, bleak qualities and most importantly a sense of abandonment. Such places are usually houses or rural farming land, with hints of desertion and decay pervading each stanza.…
A Note on ‘Still’ and ‘Even in dreamscapes’ / Christopher Meredith
Old Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher, held that all change was an illusion. Nobody quite knows what he was on about, though his follower Zeno tried to ‘prove’ that nothing moves with his paradoxes about arrows never logically being able to arrive at their target etc. I like to imagine Parmenides being bitten by a mosquito…
In Memory of Mark Montinaro
Tim Evans I first got the news by text, at 8.40 in the morning. I double-checked it on Facebook and phone and eventually realised it was true. But I still couldn’t really believe Mark was dead, because he was the last person I could ever imagine dying…. Not just in his performances, but in his conversation,in his writing, in everything, his life energy was there, keen-edged, mercurial. I had seen him, just weeks ago, at Spoken Word Saturday. To never see him again seemed, well, impossible. I first bumped into him in Swansea years back at a Howl poetry night in Mozarts, in the dark, fin-de-siecle, sticky–floor decadence that was Mozarts’ trademark. In the gloomy back room, Mark’s lanky, loose-jointed frame seemed too tall for the place. And then once he started speaking, started using his voice, you realised you were in the presence of a rare talent. Yes, he was…
‘Night Fishing’
(Live at Providero Tea & Coffee House) Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as…
‘Night Fishing’
Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as a fired shell and rise at the tense…