Write Out Loud regulars who have delighted in the entertaining and crafted poems of RA (Andy) Porter that have been posted here will be pleased to hear that his high-spirited verses have been spotted by a publisher.

Luain Press, a small, independent Irish publisher, is publishing a pamphlet of 30 or so poems, titled Neighbour’s Got a New Hot Tub, after Andy won a competition aimed at new talent. Luain, owned and managed by the poet Lee Sheridan, is an online publishing house specifically designed to help emerging authors and poets find a platform for their work. Most of the poems first appeared over the past couple of years on Write Out Loud.

Andy’s career has been in advertising, and he has a natural facility with words. One poem, ‘Jargon Junkie’, is an eye-opening skewering of business jargon – “Let’s meet up for an Idea Shower / Take a helicopter view of the space”.  Another, ‘These Things I’ll Never Understand’, has a Brian Bilston feel to it, not least in a shared aversion to the Daily Mail.

Andy, who grew up in South Manchester, has a realistic, Mancunian’s view of the Lake District, taking aim at its weather in ‘Summer in the Lakes’ (“It’s hard to tell night from day,/ Grasmere and Keswick are washed away”); at what you might find floating in Windermere; but providing an altogether different view, with echoes of Arthur Ransome, in ‘1967: Ghyll Head’, the poem that concludes the collection: “Raised up by hills to a piece of heaven / The Manchester kids of ’67.”  

Other poem titles include ‘The Day My Hair Turned Blue’, ‘WB Yeats in a Salsa Class’, ‘Gethsemane in Ellesmere Port’, ‘Sleeping With Alexa’, and ‘The Last Aubergine’, reflecting an amusing and rueful way of looking at the world.  

Andy told Write Out Loud: “I’m naturally very chuffed, but definitely feeling my way in a world I know very little about! I can honestly say that it is thanks to Write Out Loud and The Poetry's Dead podcast, based in Dublin, which I discovered by chance last year, that I’ve reached this stage, after around five years of consistently writing.”

He has promised to write us an article about how it all came to pass – and we look forward to reading it!