‘Severe Sweetness’ was a poem which was chosen for publication in the Aesthetica competition in 2013, ‘The Silver Compact’, shortlisted in the Bridport 2018 and ‘Returning to Germanika’, a poem about loss, in the International Troubadour Poetry Competition 2022.
Grolier Prize Poem
ARKANSAS IN MARCH
Here things are slow colours:
ponderous red a truck starts, stalls.
A cat slinks black, lovers are a blue
amble of jeans. Sun
dissolves into the day’s yellow drowse.
Here an event
is someone seen on a sidewalk, his wood house as slumberous
green as coned fir trees. Above, a hawk is a recumbent brown on its wing-spanned breeze.
In an indolence of afternoon
clouds crawl
like words on the tongue’s indigenous southern drawl.
Colours yawn the movement of things,
light is languorous
the rain greys down.
Eastern Iowa Review
Lyric Prose, 2020
Chosen for Best Lyric Essays in 2020