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

Poetry in the Crypt: Saturday October 13 th at 7 pm St Mary’s Crypt, Upper Street , Islington, N1 2TX Featured readers: D.M. BLACK MURRAY BODO SHEILA HILLIER

Sylvia is Missing Flarestack Poets, 2012 Reviewed by Christian Ward Sylvia is Missing is an anthology featuring poems from Flarestack Poets’ 2012 pamphlet competition. The slender volume looks and feels like one of Flarestack Poets’ pamphlets, boasting a bright pink cover and a large, simple font. If you passed it in a bookstore, you would notice it immediately. There are no quotes from poets on the back cover, just a blurb that boldly says it contains “Poetry that dares outside current trends, even against the grain...collections that aren’t bus queues, from poets forging their own linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.” I’m always wary when presented with statements like these, particularly if the poetry doesn’t always fall in line with their description. If you’re going to use such hyperbolic language to try and win me over as a reader, then it has to deliver - even more so when the pseudo-academic babble of ‘forging their own linguistic connections w...

LONG POEM MAGAZINE Launch of Issue 8 Wed 26 th September 2012 at 6.30 pm Barbican Library Barbican Centre , Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS Refreshments Free Entry   Readers: S tephen Watts Claire Crowther Timothy Adés Tim Liardet Giles Goodland Patricia McCarthy Kate Miller Maitreyabandhu Mark Goodwin Maureen Duffy Gavin Selerie & Richard Berengarten

coffee-house poetry at the troubadour …announcing the sixth annual troubadour international poetry prize judged by jane draycott & bernard o’donoghue with both judges reading all poems sponsored by cegin productions prizes: 1 st £2,500, 2 nd £500, 3 rd £250 plus 20 prizes of £20 each plus spring 2013 coffee-house-poetry season-ticket plus a prizewinners’ coffee-house poetry reading with jane draycott & bernard o’donoghue on mon 3rd dec 2012 ...for all prize-winning poets submissions by mon 15 th oct 2012 judges Bernard O’Donoghue ( b. Cullen, County Cork) is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; a former Reader at Magdalen College and Fellow and tutor at Wadham College, Oxford, he co-edits the Oxford Poets (Carcanet) series with David Constantine. Farmers Cross (Faber, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2011 TS Eliot Prize following poetry collections which include Poaching Rights (1987), The Absent ...

The Burning Bush 2 presents Patrick Chapman, Christodoulos Makris and Kevin Graham at the Irish Writers Centre, on Thursday 27th September. Admission is free and doors open at 7:30pm. Our featured poets will be preceded by an open mic: the first six people to sign up on the night get a slot. Patrick, Christodoulos and Kevin have all featured in The Burning Bush 2 magazine. Check out issues our first three issues on www.burningbush2.com Patrick Chapman is an Irish poet, writer and screenwriter, born in 1968. His poetry collections include Jazztown , (Raven Arts Press, 1991), The New Pornography (Salmon Poetry, 1996), Breaking Hearts And Traffic Lights (Salmon Poetry, 2007), A Shopping Mall on Mars , (BlazeVOX, 2008) & The Darwin Vampires , (Salmon Poetry, 2010). His story collection, The Wow Signal (Bluechrome) was published in 2007. His new and selected poems will be published by Salmon later this year. You can find him at www.patrickchapman.net Christodoulos Makris...

Eyewear is very glad to feature a poem by Tiffany Anne Tondut - pictured - this blustery London Sunday. Tondut is a confessional poet, performance poetry tutor at The City Lit and columnist for The Chap magazine. Born in 1981 and raised in Cambridge, she undertook her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Theatre Studies at The University of Essex, from which she graduated with First Class Honours in 2005. Her first play Plagued was performed at The Lakeside Theatre. Over the next three years she developed her playwriting with The Soho Theatre before returning to poetry. In 2008 she won a publication in Poetry News followed by appearances in magazines including Nutshell and Rising . She has a CW Poetry MA from Kingston University.  Her work has been published in a number of anthologies including Split Screen , Penning Perfumes , E17 Poetry Trail and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam . In August 2012, her debut chap book The God of Love is Stained was publishedb...

A terrible injustice has occurred in the UK .  If it had happened in Russia or Iran, we'd be enraged and shocked.  A woman has terminated her pregnancy (very late) by her own hand, and buried the dead foetus.  The judge and law call this a baby, and have jailed her for 8 years.  The judge is a Christian fanatic, as it turns out, opposed to abortion laws as they now stand.  As a Catholic, I know what I am supposed to think, but as a rational and tolerant human I know what I believe - no man (or other person) can tell a woman what to do with her womb; Sarah Catt may have done something sad, unfortunate, even borderline troubling.  Wrong, unethical - debatable.  But criminal?  No.  This person is a political prisoner, imprisoned by a fanatical Christian patriarchy, and she should and must be freed.  In a week that bristles with rage at MP's shouting at police officers, let us spare some sympathy for Ms. Catt, who has been slapped with the ...