A week in Poetry

Being a writer, and particularly a poet, can sometimes seem just a long endurance course of rejection. The world of prose publishing is particularly bruising at the moment, but on the poetry front some very nice things have been happening for a change.

At the beginning of the week Abegail Morley featured 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' on her wonderful poetry site (which includes lists of magazines as well as poets) and has promised to review the collection at the beginning of May.  This came just after Michelle McGrane had featured 6 poems from the collection on Peony Moon.  Check both sites out for some fantastic international poetry.  And both Abegail (published by Cinnamon and Pindrop)

 
 and Michelle published by Salt) are very fine poets in their own right.

Then, yesterday, I opened the Poetry Kit newsletter to discover that the collection and my website were featured on Poetry Kit. (click on Poetry Kit Awards 2012)

If you haven't found this site yet, it's a mine of information for poetry events and publications all over the world.  It takes a bit of time to work out how to navigate through all the windows, but there's some really good information there and the newsletter is excellent.

Then, just to put the chocolate flake in the ice cream, Two Ravens Press accepted 3(!!) of my poems for their new Earthlines Anthology of Eco Poetry.  I've very pleased about this, because they're poems from the new sequence of poems based on the mythology and literature of the Haida Gwaii islands. I'm probably challenging fate by telling you before they've actually appeared, but I'm really excited!

If you haven't found Two Ravens Press yet, they publish some top quality books - fiction, poetry and 'eco-literature'.  Murmurations, an anthology of short fiction edited by Nicholas Royle, has been getting some fantastic reviews in the 'Heavies', also featured on BBC Radio 4,  and Alice Thomson's Existential Detective  was the Sunday Telegraph book of the year. 

Haven't heard anything about my prose submissions yet, but one just has to hope that 'no news is good news' in the current climate! Fingers well and truly crossed.  It's just as well there's an up as well as a down.

I'm reading with Michael Woods at The Green Pub, Clerkenwell Green, London, on Wed. 11th April, at 7.30pm.  Free Entry.  Templar Poetry.