Shaun Barr

Another wonderful gem from Charles Simic, and another reminder I must read more of his work. Thanks for sharing Phillip.

My Possessions I have lots of dead friends And few streets I still roam With eyes open or shut Hoping to run into them. I have address books big and small With crossed out names Two clocks and many wristwatches I haven't heard tick in years. I have a large black umbrella I'm scared to open indoors As well as outdoors No matter how hard it rains. Like a cobbler lost in a shoe He is repairing I rarely look up From what I'm doing, One foot in the grave, all but certain.

Charles Simic

If you're working on submissions this weekend, remember @icefloepress.bsky.social is open to your visionary, expansive hybrids on PROCESS/ MARGINALIA/OTHERWOR(L)D(S)!

Hybrid = 2 mediums at least.

Some brilliant work coming in so far. Deadline: 30 November.

We look forward to reading your work🔥

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

— Louise Glück

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"

Emily Dickinson

#poetry #poetrycommunity #books #reading

Niamh Gallagher · Carrion and Earth: Ireland’s Great Famine Although Ireland had endured earlier famines – including one in the 1740s that, proportionally, claimed more lives...

‘There is no doubt that food was available in Ireland throughout the crisis – just not to those who needed it most.’

Niamh Gallagher on a new history of the Great Famine.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”
~ Marcus Aurelius

November's Harmony
🎨 T.C. Steele (1893)

Sunset Do you forget the roar of tiny lungs unsettling your sleep? How I was once, a sparrow lost in the yard? Or was it safer for you to let him open new seams, your scars still so raw? I used to wake and run all of the faucets, as if we lived inside the falls. The house, lit like a constellation. Was I ever yours after that? There is such violence in the sunset. You wanted me to beg, but I held my breath as I wanted to be held. I should have said I wanted sky to claim the stars. That I understood to be a good girl I had to lie low like the aging hardwood floor. But, when I return, it's to stand in the soft light on the sun-porch. To admit the sunsets are drawn by my hand.

Chelsea Dingman ♥️

“There is such violence / in the sunset.”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social

This years Christmas-Winter anthology is a bumper 50 pages more than last year's. That can mean only one thing! More poems!

Art work by Gower artist Emma Bissonnet.

You’re very welcome!

You’re so welcome Shelagh, loved it!

Sharing a poem I found today by @shelaghrowanlegg.bsky.social from an interview by @pinholepoetry.bsky.social

Love the exquisitely crafted musicality that weaves its way throughout in lines such as:

'in that solitude / that sees any light / as solace and succour.'
#poetry #poetrycommunity

you will pry the oxford comma and em-dashes from my cold, dead hands

A strange experience yesterday. Afternoon collapsed on itself, not with a star’s power, exploded radiance falling back in concentrated immensity, but a drear apotheosis, a hum just above silent amid soiled white light. It was emptiness, not meditative or inviting action but a special kind of nothing

"From the true opponent, a limitless courage flows into you."
~ Franz Kafka

🎨 László Mednyánszky (1890)

Pause for a moment, and read...

• Sara Teasdale •

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

After a break, I've started adding to my 7th UK Poets list.

Look in my Starter Packs for all 6 lists (see comments)+ to find 900 poets based in the UK. You can browse or follow all on each list so it makes it easier to find people.

+ link to the thread of above poets

bsky.app/starter-pack...

To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things;

Emil Cioran

“Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject. Write about it by day and dream about it by night.”

-- E.B. White

Jack Gilbert knew a thing or two about loss, distilling it here with exquisite precision.

“Grief makes the heart apparent
as much as sudden happiness can.”

Wales’ first UNESCO City of Literature: Aberystwyth Ceredigion joins global network of Creative Cities | UNESCO in the UK Today, 31 October 2025, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, has become Wales’ first UNESCO City of Literature…

The glory that is my hometown—Aberystwyth. Wales’s first UNESCO City of Literature. Y peth gorau!

unesco.org.uk/news/wales-f...

From Naomi Shihab Nye's book, Everything Comes Next: bookshop.org/a/862/9780063013452

#poem #books #writing

Aspens will always be my favorite but in the Autumn they really ✨ 🍂🍂
#Photography
#Nature
#BlueSkyArtShow
#Autumn

Love this, congratulations Susan. 👏

Magdalene: The Addict I liked hell. I liked to go there alone Relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, Physically undone. The worst had happened. What else Could hurt me? I thought it was the worst, thought Nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.

From ‘Magdalene: Poems’ (2017)
—Marie Howe

#poetry #poems #booksky

Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley. Perfection.

• Edward Thomas •

Fall Song It is a dark fall day. The earth is slightly damp with rain. I hear a jay. The cry is blue.

.
From 'Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings' (2015)
—Joy Harjo

#poetry #poem #booksky

A successful moment of poetry won't let you calculate anything, for as long as it lasts, it is a mental force that silences all other mental forces.

-- Clive James