Editor Grant Tarbard has been forced to close The Screech Owl, a poetry print magazine and ezine beloved by its contributors. Tarbard, who made the announcement on Tuesday, said he had made the  decision because of “severe financial constraints”. He added:  “The Screech Owl is run with my own money and the site is expensive, and print costs are beyond my meagre budget. I’ve applied for Arts Council funding with no luck, and I live on my disability benefits, I can’t continue to justify the expense what with my son and wife having to go without.”

Just before he was about to launch the first print issue of The Screech Owl, Tarbard suffered a stroke that left him in a wheelchair. Undaunted, he went ahead with the launch a year later at the Poetry Cafe.

One regular contributor, David Cooke, said The Screech Owl’s regularly updated ezine had been “rolling out a vast array of new poems every week, each of them accompanied by a uniquely appropriate photograph or painting. One can only imagine the dedication and time it must have taken for the editor to have found them. Grant’s tastes are eclectic and the range of voices he has found space for has been dazzling.”

Another contributor, Bethany W Pope, said that one of Tarbard’s goals had been “discovering and encouraging voices that have either been neglected or locked out of the larger poetry world; and he has done this brilliantly. The theme of the magazine centred around Lilith, the apocryphal first-wife of Adam who was kicked out of Eden for dismantling the hierarchy that the men in her life (Adam and God) used to keep her docile. For centuries, this mythic figure was presented as a demon, a great evil, until modern readers (clear-eyed from draughts of Jung) began interpreting the story differently. These were the kinds of poems that Grant Tarbard encouraged; stories that turned the myths on their heads, that recast the world from a new angle, stories whose subject matter might have been considered crass or unpublishable by other magazines, but which explored the shadows beneath the hems of the holy robes of God, revealing the beauty hidden there, and did so with writing that was well-formed and beautiful.

“I’m very sorry to see that this magazine is closing. Risk-takers, knights, are rarities now. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, yet, of plumbing those depths the archives remain; I suggest that you check them out.”

Contributor Angela Topping said: "It's not easy being an editor and Grant has brought readers an excellent magazine even through setbacks like a major illness and a lack of funding. In all my dealings with him I have found him a font of good humour and taste." Another contributor, Jonathan Beale, added: "Grant Tarbard is a very catholic editor, taking in all styles, and that is where The Screech Owl's strength lies. The work is always unusual, demanding, strange, intriguing, and always worth reading. The Screech Owl has sparked many imaginations new and old, and I look forward to the phoenix rising."

The latest and final print issue of The Screech Owl includes ‘The War Reporter Paul Watson Reviewed’ by Dan O’Brien, winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh first collection prize and the Troubadour prize. Another contributor was the famed poetry sleuth, Ira Lightman, who read at the launch of the first magazine in January 2013.  

In his message to contributors and readers, Grant Tarbard, a former computer games journalist who quit his job for poetry, added: “It’s been a pleasure to work with you and we have made art together.” And he told Write Out Loud that “if anyone wants to take it over, I’m open to passing the torch”.