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Featured Poet: Paul Adrian

Eyewear is very glad to feature, this Bank Holiday Monday, the young British poet, Paul Adrian, pictured, who recently won the UK's top poetry competition for a single poem - The National Poetry Competition. Adrian was born in West Yorkshire in 1984, and still lives there. He studied Music Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University, and currently works in a bookshop. He has been Books Editor of Leeds Guide Magazine, and still writes a regular politics column for them. He has also contributed book reviews and interviews to several other publications, including BBC Online. He is a volunteer with the Volunteer Reading Help scheme. Here is a poem regarding Bruce Lee:


One Inch Punch

No stooge or trick
palmed a boulder’s weight behind Lee’s
outstretched hand, the livewire might
accumulated in that brief
distance being not true strength

but practiced flick
of deepest, flawless certainties
proving untimid to the light,
the pulsing fist of heart’s belief
undiluted at arm’s length.

poem by Paul Adrian; published with permission of the author

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