I am grateful to Jan Heritage, editor of Finished Creatures poetry magazine, for publishing in issue 8 (Dec. 2023) a new poem of mine, 'By Design'. The poem, for an issue whose theme is 'Edge', was inspired by the dress of the figure in the artwork by Gurminder Sikand that appears on the cover of my chapbook Transmission Blues.
I'm grateful to Philip Rowland for publishing my poem 'Elegy on the Line' in Noon: Journal of the Short Poem Issue 24, p.78.
I'm very pleased to have an ekphrastic poem in issue 7 of Finished Creatures. My poem, 'Woman and Cell', is inspired by a late drawing of that title by Gurminder Sikand and by others of hers contemporaneous with it.
I am grateful to Alan Baker of Leafe Press for publishing two poems I wrote recently for a couple of special occasions. The first, 'Only Correct', appeared in an online Festschrift, edited by Alan with Andrew Taylor, for the poet Cliff Yates . The second, 'Reading at the Brasserie', was likewise produced for a celebration. Both were inspired by the voice of Gurminder Sikand.
The poet Andrew Taylor, a close family friend and colleague, has written a poem in memory of the artist Gurminder Sikand, my late wife. I am delighted to have permission to publish it here for the first time.
Makers’ Balm i.m. Gurminder Sikand The dark wing of winter & its saddest sounds from the hill a simple view to the city cold sucks the juice out of the air new shirt cuffs hide a floral pattern low sun illuminates your image amongst the books & art at home steam from tea spirals & fades I am grateful to Peter Thabit Jones for publishing four of my poems in issue 32 (Summer/Autumn 2020) of The Seventh Quarry magazine. The poems are loosely linked in their concern with proximity and distance. Three of them are travel-themed. 'Sign' results from a break on the north Norfolk coast four or five years ago. 'Archived' arises from a conversation with Dr Jenny Gaschke of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, who kindly showed me a notebook of the artist William James Müller (1812-1845). (I shall be posting that poem online and linking to it here at a later date.) 'Procession', a whimsical metaphysical exercise in sibilance, follows several stays in the vicinity of St Paul's Cathedral in London. 'Reading Wendell Berry' records life outside the page ending up on it. Perhaps in revised form, one or two of these poems may end up in my second pamphlet, which I hope to put together this summer.
Thanks to Michael Bartholomew-Biggs for publishing this poem in London Grip. It begins with two events recalled from childhood: an excruciating misidentification and an act of entrepreneurialism happily unrepeated since. Over time, as I chipped away at it, 'Stone' became what I usually hope to avoid writing: a poem about a poem. The tone changed too. Perhaps the speaker, whom I meant to be sympathetic, risks seeming insufferable. So, things aren't always as they appear to us. We can laugh at that fact, try to make something of it, or do both, as I think the speakers' parents knew.
I'm pleased to have a new poem published in issue 16 of Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem. Readers who have travelled over Nottingham's Dunkirk Roundabout on the A52 will recognise what inspired it. Thanks to Philip Rowland for taking the poem and to Andrew Taylor, whose (much superior) work is an influence. Andrew has two poems in issue 14.
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Tim Youngs
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