COME AND JOIN THE CONSPIRATORS AS OPEN BOOK CLOSES ITS DOORS FOR THE FINAL TIME. AFTER THREE YEARS WE ARE CLOSING THE BOOK AT THE ORGAN GRINDER AND MOVING ON TO NEW PROJECTS.
COME AND CELEBRATE AT AN ANTI-PARLIAMENTARIAN WORD BASH.
I tried to open your gate. It was huge, an oblong snug in the wall, covered in curls and blisters of thick green paint, and creaked a bit
but wouldn’t budge from its cradle of alder trunks. Ivy tendrils and leaves hid any view beyond the slats and bars. I pulled them aside
and that is when I saw you, the ghost of you, twenty or so, on a splendid little lawn, laughing with an airman, and beautiful,
and not knowing I’d ever come this way, that I’d ever exist, not wanting me to. You’ve told me this, and who am I to argue?
I stepped back, unseen, leaving you in peace, and called you, fifty-five years later: there’s no time but the present, no other life for us
to cling to. You were out, and didn’t answer, but called me back when I was about to go.
Rory Waterman’s third collection of poems is Sweet Nothings, 2020. His next is forthcoming early in 2024. He is Associate Professor of Modern Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
Come Here to This Gate, Rory Waterman’s fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: ‘your silences were trains departing’. The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet’s rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a ‘doll left behind at Chernobyl’ must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, grew up mainly in Lincolnshire, and lives in Nottingham. His previous full-length collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; and Sweet Nothings (2020). He is also a press critic, and has published several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University.
Author photo by Thomas Curtis.
Velvet Pandemic Cage
Bird scarer at 8.00 no minimalism here yellow wall amplification Mary’s ambient focus first Kasar’s ‘Leaping’ & travels into old Europe It all seems so absurd Doris writes on the wall 12.4.85 luxury of afternoon coffee sparrows continue to chirp through the rain that gathers on canopies the Tour hums along while dealing with mediocrity
Acknowledgements to Mary Lattimore
European Hymns is the fourth collection by Andrew Taylor to be published by Shearsman Books. Over four sections, the book traces the calendar year throughout the seasons. Beginning with the optimism that spring brings, the book offers up the arrival of the nightingales in rural France (an ongoing interest of Taylor’s) then navigates through summer trips to cities, takes in periods of reflection amongst the closing down of a summer house, the sudden shift to Autumn and the inevitable descent into winter.
This is Taylor’s most wide-ranging collection to-date, in turns observ-ational and detailed. The poems also deal with the changes in the natural world, while others offer snapshots of moments in time, with Taylor often re-employing his minimalist practice to useful effect.
“In a sense these poems are cubist, presenting multiple perspectives of a scene or an event without privileging any single one. The poems deny a single, omniscient self. It’s a natural human tendency to impose a narrative on experience, and these poems seem to be trying to strip that away and present experience as it is.” Alan Baker, Litter Magazine
From reviews of March (2017):
“A blast of refreshing air in the gloom of Fenland Winter” —John James
“‘Honesty Box’ is the most recent example of how Taylor’s words can present a more lasting reflection of Time’s inexorable progress. It is an important poem and one that deserves some serious consideration as the latest example of a fine genre in which a human individual contemplates both movement and stasis’ —Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence
Andrew Taylor is a founder member of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and poetics has appeared in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos (Salt) and Otoliths. He is co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. As poet-in-residence at Liverpool Architecture and Design Trust he undertook a residency at Liverpool Cathedral where poems and poetics were gathered in the pamphlet Cathedral Poems. He completed a PhD in poetry and poetics in 2008 and teaches English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
This biggest event since this fella turned up in tarn back in the day
Cassius Clay was also photographed with two well-known Nottingham Police Officers. PCs Geoff Baker and Denis ‘Tug’ Wilson were both about 7 feet tall in their boots and helmets.
Trevor has worked in health and social care for 35 years, now specialising in autism training and consultancy. He was the co-director of Derby Poetry Festival on its inception in 2017 and ran the Festival from 2018 to 2023. He is a regular contributor to poetry events in the Midlands, a member of Derby City Poets and Nottingham’s DIY Poets, has performed at the Nottingham, Gloucester, Morecombe and Ludlow Festivals, Gateway to Southwell and the Edinburgh Fringe. Trevor has been a commissioned writer on the Writing East Midlands Elder Tree Older Peoples Psychiatric, Local: Vocal coalfields, and Beyond the Spectrum projects. Trevor has contributed to several poetry anthologies including Nottingham (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and Over Land Over Sea (Five Leaves Press). He has two poetry collections, Outsider Heart and Salt Flow published by Nottingham based Big White Shed.
He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
SHAUN BELCHER
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem ‘The Ice Horses’ was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project. He helps Neil ‘Mad Bear’ Fullwood run the Book that is always Open.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.
Leanne Moden is a poet, theatremaker and educator, from Nottingham. She’s been performing poetry for over fourteen years, and she was a semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam in 2018. Her second pamphlet of poetry was published in 2020 and she’s fuelled by Jaffa Cakes, fruit tea, and unrelenting whimsy.
Sonia Burns is a poet, performer, community worker and workshop facilitator currently based in the East Midlands.
Her first poetry chapbook, Umbra:philia, was published in November 2021 by the Derbyshire based Bearded Badger Publishing Company.
Stash
Your spaces silently narrow – slowly clogging arteries, plaque formed out of photographs, boxes stacked and shelves furred up, records, CDs, DVDs. Kitchen stuffed with cookery books, spiralisers, coffee machines and avocado-half-holders; although you only eat shop-bought sandwiches.
You just-in-case curator of paperclip collections, plastic bags in plastic bags, kooky cat-themed accessories, shrewd car boot sale bargains, teaspoon souvenirs, steaming pot plant jungles and perfume bottles just for show; although nobody visits you now.
Your screams of anguish smothered, by piles of tea towels, never used, sheepskin rugs and blankets, new clothes with the tags still on, threadbare vintage jackets, jazzy earrings sifting dust, designer trainers for that trendy hip hop look; although you don’t go out these days.
You stent the walls with vague talk of sorting out and getting rid but you are crushed beneath it all, your breathing becomes agonal. Only the stuff of life remains, like fat congealed inside a vein or papier-mâché around a balloon; left behind for us to pick through.
Caetano Capurro is a Urugayan poet who uses his experience of growing up around the world to dissect his experience with race, immigration and mental health. Delving in to each topic and exploring how his experience is reflected in that of the people around him, weaving rhymes and wordplay he tells his story through how he sees the world.
Poem;
You need to hold on, because the hopes dreams and desires, they have no best before date because our passions never expire no, they evolve. They grow and manifest they stand up to the test of time, they crest the hills of expectation, and I know it sounds naive because under the watchful eye of our own observation it’s like watching paint dry, it’s like watching grass grow, it’s a process that’s light touch, A process that’s slow, one the longer you stare at the slower it will go, it’s so hard to step back and see the path you carved through stone, it’s so hard to realise how far you’ve come when you’re alone. You are a spark of greatness and together we are a flame of brilliance, and I don’t know how to explain this but we come alight we burn so bright and cast out the darkness that envelopes us because despite our fears doing all they can to contain us all the same, once we see our own shine, they’ll scurry in the the recess of your mind not forgotten but another hurdle we overcame. Another reminder that our pain is not what defines but our ability to grow stronger is what refines us, a moment that reminds us we are so much more than those emotions that try to confine us. So late those passions blossom in to possibility you never possibly expected to be possible. We contain all we need within ourselves to find greatness, all the drive within yourselves to make this, ignore the doubts they all hold in themselves to break this. Rediscover what compels you to uncover beauty, harness is and use it as your finest tool to carve out your hopes dreams and desires, because they have no best before date no, your passions don’t expire.
Best wishes,
Caetano Capurro He/Him Poet | DJ | Playwright | Teacher
• The world is big enough to get lost but not too small to be found •
like the circle of snow-white light at the end of an exhaust pipe
into bright bright air
despite ourselves
And here’s a bio:
Rich Goodson’s ‘Mr Universe’ was chosen by The PBS as one of the best 4 pamphlets of 2017.
Last year he came first in Freedom From Torture’s poetry competition.
This year he was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition.
Zen Buddhist. Therapist. Queer warrior.
“Convincing and compulsive, original, adroit and dramatically exciting.” (George Szirtes, poet)
“Experimental, playful, politically engaged… offers a wealth of creative approaches in poems that are full to the brim: he is following William Blake’s road of excess in search of knowledge.“ (Andrew Jackson, PBS Pamphlet Selector)
“Fast, decisive and funky.” (T.R.Langton, poet)
“...judicious to the point of delicacy. They’re as taut as a dancer’s calf.“ (Gregory Woods, poet and critic)
ANTHONY R OWEN
mde
An atomic bomb survivor donates her body for scientific research
I am just the silk of a nervous system
its vast tree fanning in a storm of creation
and all the nests have long gone of song
If you bring me an American cuckoo
then I will throw my doves.
I was just a girl who bled into a woman.
A Japanese shape in a polka dot dress,
the pattern branded onto my skin.
Each circle my ground zero.
Each burn your firestorm,
so here is your body.
If we took a drive over Earth now
I dreamt you and I were driving over Earth’s sky and tuned into the radio of each country hearing ballads fading out to white noise. We noticed moon was a frosted bullet-hole and behind the black glass of space was the explosion of impact where brain matters of Gods making new worlds were actually reflecting the end of ours. We passed the blue desert of ocean to ice and watched it shrink like snowflakes in greenhouses. We turned up the radio over Syria and all of the stars turned to cats-eyes taking us to streets of roadkill in human clothes. As we broke down their sun hurled itself through this street in an act of self-immolation for all the people maddened by war. I dreamt you and I were driving in darkness with earth and moon as our busted headlights, “it’s no wonder we got lost” you said. We turned off the radio and watched sap bleed out from elms as sparrows gave it song. We slept in the beautiful earth.
Adult Autism
Before I was special
I was an angel in formaldehyde.
I was a minotaur with bulging bollocks.
I was Perseus versus Medusa trapping her in my shield.
‘If Anais Nin and Shane Meadows met at a bar to write prose and poems it may well end up like this. An awareness of vulnerability is a strength that Hannah Teasdale expresses with power and insight whilst creating an urban cinematographic vibe of working-class life without for one moment feeling sorry for itself…’
Antony R. Owen
Poem from ‘Indelicate Sundays’
The Weir
Let’s try our luck at getting lost
and step out into the slant-rain black
storm the path where rivers flood
and chip-wrappers, dog-shit and lichen
become one. Let us locate ourselves, or not,
by the water’s flow, upstream, from the bank
where his bloated body was found. They think
he didn’t mean to drown, local chitter-chatter hinting
he was pushed by a gang of needle-hungry tramps.
It’s a good story. I push down my jeans and squat, piss
behind the emergency life-float ring. Your clothing fades
into the middle of nowhere and my downstream disappears.
Also Published in ‘Interpreter’s House’ Issue 65
Adrian Buckner’s poetry collections are available from Five Leaves and Leafe Press, the latest being SeeSaw from Leafe.
Since retiring from teaching poetry and creative writing at Derby University, he has been grappling with the highly contestable idea of a purely lyrical poem, and attempting to write some.
The Ancient Sunbather
He’s not impressed by warnings
of a hole in the sky:
Six weeks and not a drop of rain;
he is back in a golden age
of summers possessed undimmed
in his ageing heart.
He lies in the parched land
like a die hard colonist
sticking it out in Delhi after ‘47,
making a go of the new Rhodesia –
unmoved by forebodings of a world
falling in, a setting sun.
Rick Hall is a writer and consultant on the arts, creativity and learning, and the founder of Nottingham education charity, Ignite!. Now retired from Ignite!, Rick is a Visiting Fellow at NTU, and serves on the steering groups of Nottingham Civic Exchange, Creativity Collaboratives and the European Citizen Science Association. A frequent visitor to Finland, Rick was Writer in Residence in the village of Koli in North Karelia in 2019. His current projects are research into children’s games and the A-Z of Community. His poetry comprises occasional topical sonnets, and thankfully has never been published.
And a few lines from The Start of the Cricket Season
Cricket
I’m pleased to inform all chums in the States That a new cricket season’s upon us; While Tiger stalks lush greens at Augustus, The next batsman in, in gloom sits and waits.
The crowd under blankets peers shivering, His dog seeks ankles to worry and bite; (Rage, rage against an appeal for bad light) Like all hope, his sandwich is withering.
When drizzle to showers brings out the covers, And dewdrops on cold noses become streams, The scorer in his box muses and dreams, ‘Not a past-time for wild Latin lovers.’
In April, anticipation’s complete; The sound of leather on willow is sweet.
Released 31st May, 2024 // 120 pages // 978-1-916938-19-9 // RRP £11.99
All Empty Vessels is an urgent, emotional commentary on what it is to exist in our contemporary world. Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson each taking 6 sections of 6 poems each, explore topics as widespread as the class system, Edgar Allen Poe, and the lyricism of night. Even poetry and poetics itself becomes a subject of scrutiny. In the hands of these two poets, these themes become an eclectic, fluid tapestry of ideas that mold themselves around both the specific and the universal, and that present an unapologetic, honest, and uncompromising account of modern life. All Empty Vessels is a book for those who want poetry to be unafraid, and written with a fire whose embers lay smouldering long after the pages of the book have been closed.
PRAISE for All Empty Vessels:
Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson’s All Empty Vessels is a multi-person conversation. Two men in conversation with imagination, language, illness, power and limitation. Back and forth, between the poets — whose friendship is evident in the collaboration — the reader is brought into the intimate space of confession, creativity, chaos and collaboration. This joint collection makes few promises, but the one it demonstrates is that even in emptiness, connection is a companion for All Empty Vessels.
— Pádraig Ó Tuama
This diurnal/nocturnal double act spits and wheezes an electro-magnetic sociology of the underdog spirit with venom and flare. Animated by a summonings or invocation of Edgar Allan Poe and a character named ‘Poet’, the reader is razed by a wild-card graffiti of the spirit. This is a Butoh of working class robustness/consciousness: a dance of death performed to the British class system, executed on an altar of flickering screens, night walks, radiophonic dead air and luminous introspection. A haunting is bad enough, but a double haunting, where Kent summons McPherson and McPherson responds to Kent, reads like a vigorous card game: the flickering deck of their contaminant thought laid down swiftly, card by card, and without remorse. And yet, there is bathos, tenderness and liminality. In a dual showmanship of a new warning for both past and future, these are ‘new forgeries. . . for invisible dawns’ housed in a ‘coffin rolled across a minefield’. You stand warned.
— MacGillivray
Two poets writing so brilliantly and wearing a full suit of artistic armoury; what’s not to like? Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson’s poetics are simultaneously interfused and complimentary of one another, befitting a book of exceptionally nuanced, collaborative poems and texts. Open, ludic, tender, defiant and with multiple helpings of satiric wit, nothing appears off limits in these poems of lyric intimacy, cast across psychological (and socio-political) time and space. Kent and McPherson are a pair of shapeshifters, metamorphic, restless, and so continually uncovering and recovering perceptions within a spindled self. Here, hearts become mirrors in a family tree, the ‘I’ orbits ‘delicately as a torpedo on payday’ and desire is haunted ‘with the eyes of a gundog’. Death is cast too, never far away like an eye at the porthole. This metamorphic effect tilts the poem from sea to sky and back down to earth again, ensuring the writing is located at all times, bound by both poet’s perfect-pitch musicianship. All Empty Vessels listens in to the overboiling temperature of the times. This is a bicameral poetics that comes with stark and subtle warnings. Poets too are implicated, everything is at stake—it’s all or nothing, as Jean Genet said it must be. Time to wake up from ‘tone-deaf banjo’ playing and ‘ceremonial bootlicking’, or else ‘the future watches rabbits thrashing in the snares’. Read this and be fully nourished, yet hungry and, as I did, read it all over again.
— James Byrne
ABOUT Aaron Kent & Stuart McPherson:
Aaron Kent is a working-class writer, stroke survivor, and insomniac from Cornwall. His 2nd collection, The Working Classic, is available from the87press. He has read his poetry for The BBC, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Stroke Association, had work published in various journals, and is an Arvon tutor. His poetry has been translated into languages including French, Hungarian, German, Cymraeg, and Kernewek, and has been set to music.
Stuart McPherson is a prize-winning poet from the UK. His poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog Magazine, Bath Magg, Poetry Wales, Anthropocene, Blackbox Manifold, Prelude, and One Hand Clapping. In October 2022, Stuart was the winner of the Ambit Annual Poetry Competition. His second collection, End Ceremonies, was published via Broken Sleep Books on August 31st 2023.
SUBMIT TO THE MEDUSA Kathy Kieth, tireless editor of ace American online journal Medusa’s Kitchen, having recently published work by Open Book host Neil Fulwood and regular Open Book attendee Hongwei Bao, has put out a transatlantic appeal for more work from Nottingham poets.
Let’s not disappoint her. Head over to Medusa’s information and submission guidelines page (link below) and send her your best and boldest work.
I am @beckycullen on Twitter @drbeckycullen on Instagram (not on the latter as much)
Becky Cullen is fond of all kinds of potatoes. Her poems dip in and out of the different lifetimes experienced by someone (still) living in their home town. ‘Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings’ was a winner of the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; her debut collection ‘A Reader’s Guide to Time’ won the Live Canon competition.
Here is the text and a poetry film of my poem ‘How to Hang Washing’ – film by Rebecca Goldsmith
How to Hang Washing
It must be spring. There should be blackthorn
blossom, a smudge of sun across your cheek.
From your patch of earth, you’ll hear the crest
of chatter from the playground at the school.
These pegs nip snugly, in time with magpie
calls, as your arms lift, stretch, clip, repeat.
BIRGIT FRIEDRICH
Birgit Friedrich, originally from Germany, found her home in Nottingham in her thirties and has never looked back. Nottingham also serves as the setting for her novel, What I Never Knew About Love. She hopes to finish the final edits of her novel soon so that she can return to writing poetry.
Some of her poems can be found in the anthology Settlement Status and Poetry for All, published by Civic Leicester in 2021.
After completing her MA in Creative Writing at NTU, she co-founded Dandelion’s Poetry, a local poetry group.
When she’s not writing or reading, you can find Birgit at poetry events and pubs, enjoying a glass of wine or two with her incredible friends.
