MEMBERS READING DECEMBER 2007:

  MIKE BREWER, MAXINE LINNELL, BRIAN FEWSTER

                 MEMBERS READING APRIL 2008:

   SIOBHAN LOGAN, GRAHAM NORMAN, JEAN HARBOUR

                 MEMBERS READING JUNE 2008:

     ANNE KIND, NORMAN HARRINGTON, ANDIE WINGHAM

               MEMBERS READING FEBRUARY 2009:

       DAVID BIRCUMSHAW, GISELA HOYLE, HUW WATKINS

                 MEMBERS READING 23RD OCTOBER 2009

       LYDIA FINLAY, CHARLES LAUDER, D.A.PRINCE

Gisela Hoyle is a secondary school teacher and writes to maintain a precarious hold on reality. Goethe claimed that all his poetry was occasional - based in reality and that has always seemed an ideal worth striving for: writing which explores recognisable experiences and tries to make sense of them

                               eyes will look up and find
the moon’s no longer upside down, the stars
not strangers then; the compass hold its north
again; a quiet centre grow, which might
in the relentless alembic of slow time
weave from the clay and flame enduring form.

Her first novel, White Kudu, is to be published in July 2009.

Huw Watkins writes prose and poetry. At seventeen would have lived on bread and water if he could have painted. War put an end to such aspirations. Some years ago, started to paint again. Last eighteen years of his teaching career were in a Special School where he learned more from those ‘backward’ children about the creative process than from a Professor (Art in Education) he engaged with at Scraptoft.

Pigeons

Standing, they are portly,
beer-filled after a night out;
stiff in movement, heads bobbing,
as if spindled; clad still in their
best grey suits. Flying, chasing
each other in a passionate Spring
outing, they remind me of affluent
Ascot hats, wide-brimmed, serrated,
feather-swivelling through the air
without impediment, like shuttering
light ...

Mike Brewer’s poems have been published and broadcast, and he has published and broadcast those of others via Coalville Publishing and Radio Leicester.   Since 1966 he has been a Member of the Writers’ Summer School in Derbyshire where he has been a Committee Member and Poetry Course Leader.  He is obsessed with language but wonders whether too much so;  perhaps we ought to leave lust to the flesh, so he has written

In Defence of Illiteracy

Words are a filter,
No, a barrier,
Between mankind and reality,
Beauty is labelled
With verbal banality,
The packaging
Is equated
With the contents.

Maxine Linnell has just finished the MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University, and is involved in Leicester Writers’ Club.  She has written stage plays and poetry, and is working on her second novel for young adults.

Laundry

She stepped
out of that love
like crumpled jeans
after a long night out.
In the morning
she found the seams
left a mark on the skin
which didn’t wash away
in the shower.

She told him.
The phone number
he gave her
on a shred of lined paper
smelt of fear
burnt in her back pocket
for a few days
but the ink washed out
at the laundrette
and a son was forming.

Brian Fewster has been published in Poetry Review, Envoi, Staple and elsewhere. A reviewer of his pamphlet, Poor Tom’s Revenge, wrote: “Fewster's particular strength is his ability to move from the concrete to the metaphysical, creating deeper resonance and insight out of everyday events.” He will be reading from his new collection, Sympathetic Magic. See http://bfewster.members.gn.apc.org/poetry.

Unplugged

I have unplugged myself,
hammered my square peg
into a hollow haven

islanded in alien land
that all lanes lead from –
a slow stone flow

as walls sag uncorseted
thickening towards flagstones
centuries have hollowed

and bursts of lichen
print pale ripples
along a knuckled path

where I watch wagtails strut
up the steep field of thatch
that has become our horizon.

 

Irish-born Siobhan Logan teaches at LeicesterCollege. Her poems appear in various anthologies and her story, Bodywrapped, was choreographed by a dance company. Sponsored by LeicesterUniversity’s Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group to visit Tromso, Norway, she is now preparing a show called ‘Stories Drummed to Polar Skies’ for the Richard Attenborough Centre on Sat. June 28^th 2008.  In March she performed at a Northern Lights event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in London. Her poems have also been heard recently on BBC Radio Leicester.

See www.siobhanlogan.co.uk
 or www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/in_pictures/video_nation/

 
 (from Northern Hides)

 she freckled me
with the same skin
a pelt pale as exposed
earth-specked roots
shunning summers
better webbed by rain
crossing latitudes with
the ache of the north
tingling in my teeth
the jiggle of the needle
gauging degrees
whenever I approach
this white expanse

(publ. in Wherever Cinnamon Press)

Jean Harbour was born in Cheshire and brought up in the Fylde near
Blackpool. She has a degree in Modern Languages and taught for twenty- four
years in Leicestershire. With three sons and five grandchildren, she has
become a devoted grandmother in retirement. Jean is also engaged as a school
governor, a volunteer with the Youth Offending Service and as an examiner
for GCSE French. Her interests include reflexology and gardening. Reading
and writing poetry have been lifelong, if intermittent, activities.
 

Invigilation

A limbo land
slowed down to
hibernation pace
in measured steps
and clipped responses.
Yet here a flood of words
oozes on to paper
hopeful or frantic,
collected and dispatched
with relief.

Graham Norman started to write poetry onto paper in January 2006 following fifty seven years of thinking about it. He is of the opinion that, like good conversation, poetry is best enjoyed when it contains wit, honesty, intimacy and immediacy of understanding. A joyful companion or an old bore? Listeners and readers may judge for themselves.
 

Poetry Lessons

                 I
Do you hear it?  Starting with a chime,
A tintinnabulation in the mind?
If you are not literal and harsh
To resonance, but have a headlong heart,

From that soft, echoed voice may grow
And grow, chanted and cruel,
Wrung with the angry joy of Pan,
A catechrestic paean of our art.

All is clangour, clash and ruin,
Soft voiced meaning lost amid the din
The hesitancy of poetic tune
Lost without reason’s deft tocsin.

               II
It comes again; the blackbird in the ivy,
Hidden, at ease with tension,
Green stems bowing, spring light
Fearful and tender, not quite right.

You will find response to it,
Yes, here, in reasons coil,
Tightening, the belly’s roil
Dropping to turbulent thighs.

Now! A leap into the trees,
To the void between the leaves,
To hold the song, volant,
Among the binding boughs.

It is no miracle, this levitation,
For reasons limbs are strong
And there is no weight to imagination.
In truth, nothing can go wrong.

 

 Anne Kind came to England before the 1939 war and had to learn English with all the trauma that children of 12 years of age experience.   The years of uprooting have helped her and her poetry.   Anne has been a member of the Leicester Poetry Society for nearly 40 years.   She has been Chairman and a member of the Committee on a number of occasions.   She is a published poet and was encouraged to write by Emma Tyndall (Gleadall).   She received the OBE for Services to the Community of Leicestershire 1990, and won 1st prize in the Leicester Mercury Millenium Poetry competition

 BOYS WILL BE BOYS

 I’ve got a teenage geriatric
Who makes sure
The road is clear
Before belting down
A convoluting
Narrow, stone laid
Cattle-gridded one in five
Narrowly escaping
Extensive damage
to his bright new car
Not to mention his fifty-five year old
Part- worn wife.

Norman Harrington 

Norman is Chairman of Leicestershire Cricket Society.   He gives about seventeen poetry readings each year to various groups, and is an active member of RothleyParishChurch.  He has been engaged in drama for forty-four years as actor, director or writer.   Two of his one-act plays have been performed in the Little Theatre studio and two in the cathedral.   A nativity play has had many productions in schools. 

    COMPARISON 

He chipped away relentlessly
at her lack of judgment
until she reckoned
her fault was small
his critical malice
a large one.

Andie Wingham

 A life-long writer of poetry, Andie Wingham joined LPS a year ago.  "The workshops have taught me who my audience is and the importance of being clear in what I am trying to say."   Andie is very much a commentator, a wordsmith for whom the human story is important.  He believes poets should not to be afraid to tackle some of the deepest of human issues — the light and the shadow.  For Andie, poetry is a conversation with the reader.   He tries to work with the emotions of the reader, selecting his imagery to counter point inside consciences, to make us think. 'Bitter words sweet,' is one way of putting it.

"Then something intervenes to take away the treasure,
To starve oxygen from inside the heartbeat"

 This evening Andie will be sharing work from across his collection

'For too many the streets are their father:
Discipline the speed of cars, the curse of rain,
The slap of cold night wind.
And their education a modern morality tale.'

and even with a lighter note he asks questions of his audience.

'For me this dream
Is more than
What is meant by 'love.'
Because love's
Caress of delicate chiffon,
Its toreador's thrust of rich velvet,
Is a mood.'

Lydia Finlay

CABLES

Cables ― high-strung,
high-sung and whirring,
whapping and wuthering ―
rise in me
days of stinging sheets
tanging the metal masts
of ships in tethering ―
piping ― struck in tremens gathering.
Flag-tugs flap and tang
a day, buffeting
bare ears
and memory.

Though Warwickshire born, I lived in Antrim
 ‘til the age of 5, and Manchester ‘til 14 years,
enjoying dance, singing, and verse-speaking
since childhood.   I studied ophthalmic optics
and continued to write and dance and sing,

The short snap of verse refers to sailing and
waiting to sail, and listening to the compelling
recognition of the same sounds in the city.

Charles Lauder

Charles Lauder, Jr, was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and graduated from Boston University.  In 2000 he moved to the UK and in March 2008 he formed the South Leicestershire Stanza of the Poetry Society.  He's written for many years and his poems have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in such journals as California Quarterly, Texas Observer, Agenda, Envoi, Orbis, Stand, and Poetry Nottingham.

Excerpt from

Your Face before Your Parents Were Born

Each swing of the axe  field plowed  

pig slaughtered

were fragments going toward eye color

freckles on the cheek  the length of nose

as if the future—schemes of world

conquest

digging for gold   riding the rails

—were hatched

on a square of land while fathers settled

for the shirt on their back  the truss roof

overhead.

D A Prince

D A Prince has worked as a librarian and in education, but rarely writes about these.   She prefers to write poems that explore alternative ways of living.  Three pamphlets were followed in 2008 by a full-length collection ― Nearly the Happy Hour, HappenStance Press.

At swim

In the deep ocean his stroke’s
a stride, kicking
from island to island,
churning the tropical salt
to muscular waves, his trunk
a rearing snorkel releasing
shoals of bubbles.

Riding his neck, the mahout
tickles his ears like a fish, leading
this lack of gravity through
his new element,
all the weight of the world
washed away.