E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

POET-IN-RESIDENCE AT THE MUSEUM OF ROYAL WORCESTER   Ben Parker’s debut pamphlet, The Escape Artists , was published by tall-lighthouse in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2013 Michael Marks Award. He is currently poet-in-residence at The Museum of Royal Worcester. Church Flatts Farm All night the waves are in his room lifting him from half-dreams of bladder-wrack and drift-wood. The walls breathe like filling sails, the blood-tide beats in his ears, he is feverish and sleepless, far from instruments, with no navigator and the Pole Star lost behind plaster. When arthritis closed around his hands he left the sea and made his way here, the furthest he could move inland, and stripped his boat to make a bed. Mornings now he wakes with dry lips, salt-blur glazing the window. poem copyright the author 2015

SELECTED FOR POETRY IRELAND INTRODUCTIONS 2015 Julie Morrissy is a poet from Dublin currently living in her home city after spending several years living in Canada and the USA. She has been selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2015, and her poetry has featured or is forthcoming in Cyphers , The Dalhousie Review , Abridged and The Honest Ulsterman . The poem below is from her shortlisted unpublished collection. Moving Day   it is straight forward: boots or die boots or your toes stick together like tongues on ice boots or an all-inclusive with trays of crab claws and prawn cocktail delicious sweltering heat just a plane ride away   I write letters home inquiring about the handheld heat packs from childhood postage costs one dollar eighty-five cents and five to seven business days - not counting Family Day another provincial quirk   like the wine rack and the difference between the store

SHE GRADUATED WITH A MASTERS FROM UCL Jessica Mayhew's pamphlet, Someone Else's Photograph , was published in 2012 by Crystal Clear Creators. She graduated with a Masters from University College London in 2015. Her poetry and fiction have been published in magazines and online, including in Ambit , Stand and Staple .     Rainy Season Monks stay put so they don’t hurt the shoots. We trawl through gutter-run the colour of precious wood for another meal of rice while cockroaches tide up walls above the lapping line. Fon Tok , rain tongue spitting on a foot of soi water, lightning I cannot pronounce but count, gaining ground each time saffron dusk cracks – five miles, four miles, three. We lie with windows open, swiping mosquitoes we can only hear but smear someone else’s blood, mingled with mine, down white paint. When I sleep, the rain is bats back home that have somehow learned

Eyewear will be announcing the winner of the Melita Hume Poetry Prize in early June.  We are now halfway (at number 6) through our alphabetic posting on each of the 12 shortlisted poets.  I include a copy of the whole list below as well, to jog your memories.       Anna Mace has an interest in modernist, symbolist and experimental poetry traditions.   Within her multi-disciplinary approach she is keen to explore relationships between text, art, science and performance.   Recent work includes, collaborative project and publication, Revolve:R with film responses to her poetry by artists, Rammatik, One Five West and Maria Anastassiou . She will be poet in residence for the National Trust, summer 2015.   She has lived in Europe, India and Japan but now resides in Bristol, UK.     POET IN RESIDENCE FOR THE NATIONAL TRUST, SUMMER 2015     Not I   I t was one to remember,   th i s one, (we i ghted l i ke a holy book). More, {l i k

Eyewear Publishing has just won the world's most prestigious prize for poetry criticism in the English world for its recent collection of essays by poet, scholar, editor, anthologist and UCL professor Mark Ford , titled This Dialogue of One ! The prize is from The Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine and is called The Pegasus Prize for Criticism . We're only a small indie press in the UK, but we were competing against presses like Harvard University Press, FSG, Graywolf and others, with far larger staff and budgets - establishing publisher Todd Swift and his dynamic team ( Cate Myddleton-Evans and Edwin Smet, with Oliver Jones ) as a David against Goliath figure in literary publishing, here and across the pond in America. Eyewear's editorial vision  has already led to a first-time novelist, Sumia Sukkar , getting a BBC Radio adaptation for her debut. Meanwhile the prize cements brilliant Mark Ford as one of the key poetry critics of our age, the equal of fa

A TEACHER FROM MANCHESTER AND A POET Michael Conley is a 30-year-old teacher from Manchester.  He has been published in a variety of magazines including Magma , Rialto , Interpreters House and Bare Fiction .  His first pamphlet, Aquarium , was published by Flarestack in 2014. The poem here below is from his shortlisted collection for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize 2015.   We Discover A Severed Thumb In The Woods   Lying either side of it, we play who dares get their tongue closest.   It nestles in a pile of wet leaves, real as a joke thumb.     It mightn't be a thumb after all; could be a stubby finger. It's hard to tell   without the context of a hand. It smells like the thing you can’t find   in the fridge. You are winning: your tongue is practically touching it.     poem copyright the author 2015.     

There is no argument to restrict marriage to heterosexual citizens, even in churches. Tradition is a poor blueprint for a more just or modern world. Should we still burn at the stake? There is no explicit permission from God in the Bible but neither does God give permission for liberal democracy or hydro-electric plants. Homosexuality was a sin because all sexuality outside of marriage was a sin. So bring the homosexuality into marriage and Hey presto! That sin problem go es. Meanwhile the idea that only a man and woman can be married because only they can procreate - well not all of them can. Any couple can adopt and raise children as well. As for the argument that only married heterosexuals are truly able to be loyal and loving well sadly too many shelters for battered women tell another tale. Wedded bliss is not automatic for any gender or sexual bias. If Ireland votes No today it will be an embarrassment and a tragedy which is Hard to manage. But they managed it in the body o

SUMIA SUKKAR, BRITISH WRITER AND POET Over the next weeks, as Britain's sunny summer days intermiitently appear, we will be celebrating our Eyewear list of writers and poets HERE at our blog - each wearing a pair of shades, for the sheer fun of it. Enjoy and collect these cool images of the hot summer of reading ahead... and look for their books! Sumia Sukkar is one of our younger Eyewear Publishing authors, but her debut novel, The Boy From Aleppo Who Painted The War , is already one of our biggest successes, in terms both of sales and critical reception.  It got a glowing review in The Times , and was aired on BBC Radio 4 as a special dramatisation last autumn - it was heard by over 600,000 listeners. There is now talk of a movie adaptation, and of course we are discussing foreign translations.  Her powerful, poetic and even at times visionary story of Adam and his sister Yasmine, caught up in the Syrian conflict, strips bare the savagery of war as it impacts on innocent c

 HE EMBARKED ON A SOLO TREK   In January 2015, Tony Chan decided to take a break from senior school English teaching. Unable to dream up better ideas to cover over his unemployment, he embarked on a 1400 mile solo trek across Britain. The 78-day route started at Dunnet Head, Britain's northernmost point, and led to Britain's three other extremities. Each day yielded a sonnet. Tony is now working on his next creative project: a series of prose-fiction vignettes exploring lonesome lives.     MEMORIAL TREE There is this secluded and shaded grove Not easily noticed by passers-by Where an ellipse of matured trees surround An autumnal sea of long-fallen leaves One tree stands solitary amidst all A sapling rising slowly year on year It is wintered bare to a slender trunk Visibly without width and without leaf Yet it is full with personal meaning Each tiny branch a tender reminder Of memories deep-rooted in the mind This

FOR OUR 3333 RD POST, WE OFFER FOUR OF OUR CLASSIC IMAGES FROM OVER THE YEARS

CHARLIZE THERON IS THE NEW ICON [SPOILER ALERT] The new Mad Max: Fury Road film has had a fascinating gestation and now a narrative of striving against another kick-ass franchise, Pitch Perfect , itself a vehicle for amazing women. Well, that's the media hyped story, and let's leave it there.  I saw Mad Max 4 (as it were) on Friday in 3D in London; at the end, reactions from the audience were mixed.  If you wanted to sum it up you might say Marmite - it did create a love-hate tension in the packed theatre. I loved it.  I loved the insane Cirque du Soleil mania, the battery acid propulsion, the high-octane raciness; I loved the Trigger Warning vision of it.  The eco-warrior-feminist subtext; the redemption; the ugliness; the beauty; the sheer Wild West poetry of the cinema it extends and amplifies in its very motion. I would argue that, at 70, director George Miller , in tandem with a hugely talented team - a crew of hundreds - has choreographed one of the most beauti