Biography

I Completed a Creative Writing and Contemporary Culture Joint Hons BA at Cumbria Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a Creative Writing MA at Manchester University in 2009.

I have been performing around the country for six years, I have three times won Manchester's poetry pillow (a cuddly slam) participated in the Hammer and Tongue Slam at 2010's Edinburgh Festival.

I have two chapbooks In Photographs (2007) and Ghosts at the Dinner Table (2010) I have been published in Libertine, Unsung Magazine, How Many Roads and BlankPages.

I am a workshop facilitator, I have collaborated with visual artists, I run (with my co host Rebecca Audra Smith) Stirred: For Women Who Write a monthly poetry event and also with Simon Rennie I help facilitate Innverse a poetry event that has just celebrated its third birthday.

My work is largely free verse and broken sonnets, my work encompasses love, loss losing your mind, the surreal, the pastoral political and feminism.

you can see me read here: http://www.youtube.com/user/getonthesoapbox#p/search/0/OkI77efhULw

Samples

Magnolia Wallpaper in Whitworth Park

Eels in my ears blotting out birdsong,
the first line opens my diaphragm.
I am not singing because there are
children examining branches
with systematic ease, sticks for pointers,
and people dinnertabling the benches,
tending their burning tripod with chopsticks.
I think of all the others listening to the same song
and singing along in bedrooms, mascara applying,
tea slurping, humming off key in cafes.

I look out through tea tinted glasses,
volley ball distracts others from buses
in pencil case primary colours
rumbling past railings, I wonder if
They were offered up,
like the boning from corsets,
before the statue of the fat monarch.
The curly girl shaking German words
from her pen has leant her bike
sure it will be there when she looks up.

Clouds here gather, like dirty washing,
but we don’t suspect rain
among the soft pock of puffball mushrooms,
passed from instep to instep.
The dandelions haven’t clocked yet,
two seated flamingos crunch apples in unison,
another pair of frames has joined the sunglasses,
who sit swigging from a green bottle,
They are so simple they are in another world.


Ars Poetica

I write because when I try and tell you
about the ghosts at the dinner table,
or finding the a strand of an old lover’s hair
livid in the valley of a paperback,
the words that slither from my open mouth
Are numerous, useless.
I’ve filled rooms with them
Each in itself perfect
Burnished and coinlike.

But as I speak and they pile up
Like a shoal of aureate fishes
Each word becomes indistinct.
pressure separates my superfluous words:
My heavy pen strokes emboss the page.



My Father’s Lens?

I don’t know whose eye saw this in the viewfinder first for sure but I think it was my father if only for the composition. No mouths or eyes visible, the children all engaged with their quarry: tadpoles in a bowl. We are all illuminated against the Rousseau foliage. We are all sun-burnished hair, shades of red and white and their mingling: that washed out sweatshirt the colour of cherry blossom. I’m the only one not camellia socked. Two of us are wearing matching ladybird red-buckled Start Rite shoes. I remember the advertising: a poster with boy and girl walking into the wilderness, just hoods facing the woods. My hand is clenched while others crouch over the bowl, just my chin - a flash of white blonde bob - is visible, but those are my double plastered knees and I remember how this stick of rock striped dress would never cover them when I knelt in grass but not what I kept in the pocket.




Why Do Ducks Wear Eyeliner When They Don’t Even Dance? (2004) Tom Snape

Because I never imagined that I would search in the cupboards of a caravan comically far from Denton Holme for evidence that you had loved me, or that I would find only the sketch book with the outlines for that terrible oil painting with the false eye-lashed lobster that leant against the walls of your red, red bedroom, where I would lie with the shutters closed till you came home from work, I was always late to meet you.

The clock hands seemed to wave too fast as I sought out unrunged tights or swiped a smut of mascara from my nose. I would imagine you in the pub, seated on worn burgundy velvet,
in your thin scarf wound tight like a cravat with your two-tone half-pint and the charade you made of rolling a cigarette, your hands poised above your sketch book. The paper, that buttermilk yellow and your black ink spilling out like my smudged kohl into creatures with feathers and fins, masked men.


A Grinding Halt

You were a blueberry blip in my summer,
kissing in front of the church at
seven in the morning, soaked to the skin
while suits and ties whizzed by in the drizzle.
You didn’t feel like stupidity then,
in that moment before the flowers all opened,
before the bees arrived around the buddleia
when it still seemed like folly to eat a bowl
of bright eye and tooth-jangling ice cream.
Things progressed in fits and starts
like a procession of possibly old busses,
the poor suspension titillating,
our hearts worn, patched, ripped like the
seedy mustard and brown upholstery.


Behind the Gargoyle Thronged Window

I can’t see myself sharing
this squalid life of mine:
The spaghetti with last night’s sauce,

persuading myself
the security light makes
pearls of the rain sliding

down the window pane.
Later, condensation becomes
illuminated peach fuzz and

lavender grows by chains
near St Gregorys’ back alley,
a fact I cannot change

like the steady/unsteady
thrum of my heart
and the sensation

when I close my eyes
of falling endlessly
through the mattress

and my broken sleep,
waking convinced the sliver of glass
pulled from my palm is real.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.