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 The poem below is from her shortlisted unpublished collection.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 bet...

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 learne...

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,   ...

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 equa...

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.