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…
Jackie Gorman reads ‘The Natural History Museum in my Mind’, from Issue 14. The Lonely Crowd · ‘The Museum of Natural History in my Mind’ Jackie Gorman’s debut collection The Wounded Stork, published by the Onslaught Press in 2019, was described by Dr Martin Dyar in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘an engrossing and ecologically…
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.
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…
‘Mature People’ comes from my recently published collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision. It could well have been the title of the entire collection since the overarching theme is the experience of late middle-age reckoning; the backward glance on life, love and the whole damned thing.
Some of the action of ‘Mature People’ takes place in Trinity College Dublin – so there’s also a sly echo of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in the title. However, this is Normal People for oldies.
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.
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…
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…
The Deathwatch-Beetle Serenade
Christa’s uploaded some photos of us to the net.
It’s thirty years, and you still make me catch my breath,
Nicky. Sometimes I forget who we were or are,
Working the red-light strip from the Torenzicht Hotel to the Banana Bar.
Alan McCormick lives in Wicklow. He’s a trustee of the stroke charity InterAct Stroke Support, who employ actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.
As well as The Lonely Crowd, his writing has featured in many publications, including Best British Short Stories, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Exacting Clam, Confingo, Popshot, Poetry Bus and Sonder; and online at Dead Drunk Dublin, Époque Press, Books Ireland, 3:AM Magazine, Fictive Dream, Trasna and Words for the Wild. His story ‘Fire Starter’ came second in 2022’s RTÉ Francis MacManus Story Competition, and ‘Boys on Film’ was runner up in 2023’s Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize. His story collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, which included flash pieces illustrated by the artist Jonny Voss, was longlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. He’s recently completed his second story collection and a book of memoir essays with the assistance of an Irish Arts Council Literature Award.
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.
‘Take Away’ is about a Hannah, a fifteen-year-old struggling with ME in small town Sussex in 1990. It’s a personal story, as I was ill with ME in my mid-twenties during the same period. Hannah suffers disbelief and hostility about her illness, sometimes from classmates, but mostly from some care professionals, doctors and social workers.
Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of the novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which the Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in various publications in addition to The Lonely Crowd, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press.
Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published by John Murray in Spring 2026.
Pauline Flynn reads her poem from Issue Fourteen. The Lonely Crowd · Mary of Egypt goes into the Desert to Repent her Lascivious Life Read how Pauline wrote ‘Mary of Egypt…’ here. Image by Pauline Flynn.