From Poetry

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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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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‘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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Poet of the Month (April): 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 two new works by P. C. Evans. The first of these, ‘Selection’, is published today with two more poems to follow at the weekend.

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On Writing ‘Mary of Egypt goes into the Desert to Repent her Lascivious Life’ / Pauline Flynn

As a visual artist I am trained to see the detail in things. As a geometric abstract painter, I’m interested in paring back to shapes, pattern, colour and design in composition. When I began writing poetry, after I took a break from painting and did an MA in Creative Writing in Dublin, my tutor told me my poems were Imagist. I had read Haiku more than any other poetry form but when I took the poetry module and found I could author a poem, I was thrilled. Words have become a new medium that allows me to express myself more figuratively. The poems complement the paintings, and my life is now enriched by my engagement with both.

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Poet of the Month (March): Matt Rader

Matt Rader is the author of six collections of poems, most recently, Fine (Nightwood Editions 2024), as well as a collection of stories and a book of experimental nonfiction. His work has appeared in publications across North America, Australia, and Europe. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.

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Poet of the Month (February): Eleanor Hooker

The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet every month throughout 2025. We are delighted to commence this series with two new poems by Eleanor Hooker.   Winter Cradle    And so you arrive, trudging through old snow to find me, cradling winter – dearest Grandpa, ghost enough to shadow this page.…

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