POETiCA REViEW stands in contradistinction to those values that promote the ‘good’ as esoteric, whilst excluding the vast majority from doing art.
POETiCA REViEW exists to promote the work of the less fortunate, the dispossessed, those without a voice, but encourages the artistic talents of all, not just a privileged minority.
POETiCA REViEW Winter 2023/2024. Special 20th Anniversary Edition, featuring the work of 55 international poets...
POETiCA RViEW Issue 19, featuring the work of 21 international poets.
POETiCA REviEW Summer 2023. Featuring the work of 21 international poets.
POETiCA REViEW Spring 2023 featuring 19 international poets...
Featuring the work of 15 international poets...
POETiCA REViEW Featuring the work of 32 international poets...
Featuring 45 international poets...
POETiCA REViEW
UKRAINE WAR Special Edition
POETiCA REViEW Spring 2022 Issue 13. Featuring the work of 32 international poets...
POETiCA REViEW Winter 2021 Featuring the work of 27 poets from around the world.
POETiCA REViEW Autumn 2021. Including 27 poets from around the world.
POETiCA REViEW Summer 2021 Issue 10. Including 24 poets from around the globe.
POETiCA REViEW Spring 2021 Issue 9
Featuring the work of 22 poets...
POETiCA REViEW Winter 2020 Issue 8
Featuring the work of 22 poets...
POETiCA REViEW Autumn 2020 Issue 7
Featuring the work of 37 poets
POETiCA REViEW Issue 6 featuring 19 international poets.
New eco-poetry collection by POETiCA REViEW Chief Editor
Mark Murphy’s poems work outwards, lovingly, from the observation of two inevitabilities. First, the relentless degradation of the ecological terrain in technological society, “Perhaps we returned to you too late./Green and lovely mother.” And second, the equally inexorable individual journey towards our own passing, “So nature withdraws and descends upon us/in a domination which must end/without witness.” This is the desolate and apocalyptic environment in which we are all fated to maintain the continuity of our conscious experience. And in striving to do so we must live, plan, try to love ourselves and others, and hope that the world can sustain this striving. ‘What can I know, what should I do, what can I hope for?’ In the face of the dreadful inevitabilities, these questions still make sense, and perhaps through them we can glimpse something of a logic of hope that transcends our tragic finitude.
Prof. Stuart Toddington, author of Architectures of Justice
Editor's Eye exists to promote the weird and wonderful world of Ekphrastic Poetry, as exemplified by our Editor's poem, 'Saint George and the Dragon.' Please submit, if you've dying to share your ekphrastic verse with the world...
A selection of 10 poems from our Editor's collection, 'The Ruin of Eleanor Marx' NOW AVAILABLE from Moloko Plus, Germany...
http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/shop.html
‘The Ruin of Eleanor Marx’ is a poetry collection whose greatest quality is that it knows there is more to the world than poetry, and more to poetry than the mere arrangement of words. Mark Murphy is, however, a poet who both has a story to tell – and what a tale it is! – and the language to make that story come alive.
But fear not if you aren’t an expert on the ups and downs of the Marx family. Murphy’s poems open a welcoming door through which the non-specialist reader can easily walk.
Kevin Higgins
POETiCA REViEW Asst. Editor, Kieran Conway had the pleasure of chatting with the American poet, John Yamrus, last night, who joined him on Zoom to talk about his latest collection, ‘SMALL TALK.’
We couldn’t have hoped for a more informative dialogue, with John touching on everything that influences his writing, from the silences in the music of Miles Davis, to the ‘poetic’ nuances in Film Noir, from the concision and power of Zen, to ‘the reality of just being,’ or ‘doing the washing up.’
(Photo's taken by photographer © Mish Murphy)
In his latest collection, ‘SMALL TALK,’ septuagenarian author, John Yamrus writes about the love, ageing and loss, with all the finesse and aplomb one would expect from a major poet.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, these poems are straight from the heart, (that undefinable place), where writers and artists find their voices, and sometimes their raison d’etre.
Nature writers paint word pictures of the natural world. How can writers most effectively save nature? Should we describe nature as beautiful to inspire humans to protect it, or be as accurate as possible about the flora and fauna of the wild?
Will Reger - Adam and Eve: Paradise Lost (9 poems)
A REVIEW by Trish Saunders...
SEAWAKE AND SOME LAST POEMS
Mark A. Murphy & Milner Place (Moloko Plus Print, Germany, 2021)
Reading these lyrical poems of migration by Mark A. Murphy, inspired by Milner Place’s last poems, is to travel with the author in a lovingly built boat of homage, and drink from the same bottle, under the same night sky. As if a line exists between them, and us. Like the late Milner Place, Murphy writes with devastating brevity about the silence that follows chaos:
Out of the mists
over the somnolent mangroves
one voice is heard
above the roar of a rainbow
By including four of Place’s last poems alongside Murphy’s, the publisher lets us imagine how Milner would reply to his friend and mentor. We have clues in Milner’s deadly-accurate poem that finishes the collection:
Time is the sediment
of events
now
is the excrement
of history
This gorgeous collection is not sorrowful in the conventional sense. The deep pleasure in reading “Seawake” is a feeling of being in the same boat as two extraordinary storytellers, one very much alive and writing, one who is not. In the end, we will all be in the same river. Pass that bottle again, please.
Trish Saunders
Helen Bullas reviews ‘Sea Wake & Some Last Poems’ by Mark A. Murphy & Milner Place
This small volume of poems is a deep and eloquent conversation between two poets: one living, one recently dead. To have the last poems by Milner Place is a joy in itself, especially the wonderful -and unfearful - ‘Last will and testament:’ a flawless gem of a poem, in which Place’s voice sings out unmistakeably.
These poems are prefaced by ten new poems by Mark Murphy, written in response to Place’s death, capturing the relationship between the two, through the brilliance of the images and the interplay between the poems and fragments of Place’s own work. The themes of the sea and of sailors, of the moon and of drink and of time, tie his poems surely to those of Place. Yet they move beyond elegy into moments of new strangeness that makes them sparkle. In ‘Stem to Stern’ Murphy ranges from the stars, to liquor, to an unreliable God and ultimately to a whale ‘oblivious to trade wind or doldrums’.
Although each poem is tinged with loss, there is a strong sense of hope, whether that is in the ‘one voice ..heard, above the roar of a rainbow’ or at ‘the mountain of miracles’. These poems work best when they at their most simple and curious – Wind Chime -despite its simple structure and repetition asks some profound questions about the nature of the world but it’s great strength lies in its eschewing of easy answers and the poem ends with the question ‘What is the sea?’
These poems are sensual and exotic too and are not afraid to take a sumptuous bite at the world. in all its sadness and it’s delicious beauty.
Last will and testament
I leave you my breath, cantankerous
bones various organs, to sleep
in the shade of willows, in a warm bed
among ships.
I bequeath a blunt knife, threads
of unravelling string, nets, pointed
stakes, untended acres, the scent
of almonds.
I adjure you not to forget the picnic
basket, and when you come to me with full arms
bring a sprig of thyme, a bell full of grapes,
a gentle horse.
Milner Place
Hunters in the Snow
I am no human seeker trudging through the January snow,
no hunter’s fox slung casually over a shoulder,
no panicked rabbit running for its life, no singeing pig
to be turned on the fire, no exhausted dog
losing the scent, castigated by its master, no sainted stag,
no pious metaphor, no child’s plaything,
no trophy kill.
2
Soaring far and wide above the high horizon -- we
corvid brothers live and die just as you
under the overcast sky, wintering in, shuttering down,
eyeing the heroic Alpine mountains, and the intimate play
of the earth-born young on the ice fields
of the Netherlandish lowlands
skating, curling, faltering, falling and ultimately failing,
mirroring all of creation’s creatures, capturing
the duality of our shared nature,
surviving the winter freeze --
honouring the hard-packed snow
as much as we loathe it.

We are excited to
Showcase
the poems below on our
Home
page, and we’ll be adding to this, as and when we receive any new work we feel deserves a nomination for ‘Best of the Net’
and or the annual
‘Pushcart Prize.’ Don’t forget to keep your submissions rolling in. Who knows, you might be next...
Mark A. Murphy
Why I Am Not A Sculptor
Like the poet, Frank O'Hara, I am not a sculptor,
but a poet (at least) according to my friends,
I am a man who passes himself off as a poet.
Why? Because poetry is the property of no one.
Because stone and point would not obey
the commands of a man obsessed with oblivion.
Because the light universe is no place
for a man who lives in dreams.
Because I am in awe of Igor Mitoraj.
I am alone in the too darkened quarries
of my imagination, picking through the debris of time,
exhuming the dead, picking through the bones
of my poor dead relatives. What am I to do
without hammer or chisel? I am too many centuries old
to start over. And I am dumb beside you
because we can no longer talk or laugh at the silliness
of being who we are. More centuries pass.
Because I am not a sculptor, I am forced
on to the back foot once again.
Because I am not a sculptor, I am transfixed
by a life rendered in stone. And I say to the sculptor,
'I cannot suppress my desire to be a sculptor.'
And the sculptor answers back, 'I cannot suppress
my desire to be a poet.' And perhaps we are, each of us,
what the other wishes to be, if only
for a short time – in the margins of some other story.ragraph
Zack Rogow
Running through History
3:37
3:52
I realise
the treadmill’s blinking
rectangles of light
counting minutes and seconds
could be years of history
4:10 I jog through the sack of Rome
6:18 the Tang Dynasty rises
The angel Gabriel whispers to Mohammed to write the Qu ‘ran
7:11 I turn up the pace as the Moors pour into Al-Andalus
Troubadour Arnaud Daniel rides toward a Provençal hill town playing air-lute
12:38 the Alhambra’s delicate fortress rises above Granada
A puzzled Geoffrey Chaucer glances up from his writing desk
I sprint right through the Great Vowel Shift
Into the greenery of Botticelli’s Primavera
Deftly I step over the Black Plague
14:53 Ottoman cannons breech Constantinople
Columbus sets sail I race him to Hispaniola
The French Revolution breaks out to my left
18:21 Bolívar wins the Battle of Carabobo the Spanish Empire cracks apart
19:19 My parents are born and plenipotentiaries sign the Treaty of Versailles
19:44 D-Day and then the year of my own birth almost before I see it
I slow dance to “Mister Moonlight”
My first kiss
Crowds unbuild the Berlin Wall as I become a father
South Africans wave hats and hankies for President Mandela
20:12 the Mars Rover cuts me off
The present-day rushes by
Then the years I hope I’ll live to count
My daughter stands beneath the chuppah
My unconceived grandchild laughs for the first time
I slow the treadmill
step off
and even though I’m not moving
I’m still running
Lauren Scharhag
The Real Meaning of Inferno
Four winters on the transplant list,
and you are always cold. We bundle you
in long johns and sweatshirts, blankets
and stocking caps, and park you next to
a space heater, and still, you shiver, while
I sweat. I sweat the medical bills and the
regular bills and whether you have a fever
again, and if you are eating enough and how
we will ever pay for more medicine and
I’m going to have to get a second job. I burn
crimson like my grandmother’s red Depression
glass oil lamp. I burn blue-white like the
rings on a gas stove. I burn like the gold
and orange flames on the cast-iron furnace where
we used to heat our clothes on winter mornings,
and still got dressed under the quilt. Inferno
is a word that’s synonymous with hellfire,
but originally, it had nothing to do with heat. It
meant the lower regions. I think of this as I go
down into the basement of our sixty-year-old house,
past the cracked walls where slugs and spiders
and snakes slither in, past the exposed foundation
stones and the water stains where it’s flooded
each spring, past the shelf where we store
your dialysis supplies, to examine our own
beast of a unit. I’ve always thought it looked like
Doc Ock if Doc Ock had sprouted a few more arms,
if he’d grown feeble and rickety and might,
at any moment, give up the ghost. If it goes out on us,
no second or even a third job will be enough to help me
replace it. I come back upstairs and make us cups of cocoa.
You tell me how you dream of the sea, of sun-warmed
sand, of tropical paradises. I do not tell you that I dream,
too: nightmares of a furnace-less house in January
and frozen pipes bursting in the walls. Hell isn’t hot,
but it’s real, and it’s here. I crack open a window
away from you and try to breathe. I’m hotter than
particles smashing around the Large Hadron Collider.
I’m hotter than the torch Prometheus saw fit to pilfer.
I’m hotter than molting phoenix feathers, than
a morning-star supernova. If the furnace goes out,
split me like heartwood. I will be your hearth
and your kindling. Cook a meal over my radiance.
Bask in me. I will see you through to summer.
William Cotter
THE TAKING OF WAUBA DEBAR
Bicheno, Tasmania.
Your familiar hills,
Your family and the spiralling camp fire smoke
Should have kept you safe.
But, they didn’t and when they found you,
The white settlers with their guns and lust,
They gave your body to a sealer man
And probably called the trade a marriage.
You rescued him once,
Dragged him, with his mate,
From a tangle of surf and rigging
To the shore.
Perhaps you got a guttural word of thanks.
Certainly not your freedom
And when, years later,
You fled,
Cloaked yourself in the welcoming forest,
They found you,
The settlers and the sealers,
Murdered you,
Left the locals to bury you,
High up and alone above the sea,
Complete with a headstone
And the bay named after you.
You might have expected peace, then.
But they found you again, those settlers,
Wrenched you from the earth,
Parcelled you up
And sent your skull away to be measured.
Only the snow drops come to remember you, now,
White, perfect tear drops,
Silent and watchful each spring.
HERE LIES
WAUBU DEBAR
FEMALE ABORIGINE
OF VAN DIEMENS LAND
DIED JUNE 1832
First accepted for publication by
'Polestar Writers' Journal.'
John Yamrus
it was
just
another instance
of good plans gone bad.
it
didn’t surprise him.
right
from the starts
he knew it was going to hell.
he’d driven
halfway to her house
behind a truckload of coffins.
he
liked
that line
from The Great Gatsby
that read:
“life
is much more
successfully looked at
from a single window.”
he
didn’t
understand it,
but,
he liked it.
he felt that
everyone should have a motto.
that
was his.
anyway,
when he got to her house,
she was already
gone.
she
finally
followed thru
on her threat to leave.
before he left,
he kicked in the back door,
walked
into the kitchen
and
looked out
a single window.
Nate Hoil
[I am going to capture your flag.]
One in three agents will be killed
by another agent.
They will not be born again unless
permitted by science.
Don’t let their cuteness fool you.
They will eat you alive.
They will keep eating you
when you are dead.
I become what I am chasing.
I modify my donor organs
with my murderer silent behind
the shower curtain.
There is no such thing as karma.
aragraph
Lara Dolphin
December 14
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
I grow old though pleased with my memories
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
There is always something to be made of pain
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
In casual simplicity--
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Antonis Balasopoulos
The Raven
The raven is a kind of parody;
a winged vandalism
at the expense of the letter.
Because, though we were created
in the image of a face,
we have fallen into the similitude
of a sign worn thin
by interpretations.
And so, we would have liked
to be shiny and black
and cacophonous
and to leave the traces of rakes
on the snow-covered earth.
This is what the crow is for us:
A “nevermore” darker
than the parrot’s and more decisive
than the sweet loquacity of the nightingale
a mirror we break
intentionally, despite the seven
years of bad luck. As to
what we ourselves are for the raven
I don’t know. Ask
the wires and ask the grain fields
that have gone yellow with madness
and get away, get away from
this poem.
The Birth of History in Herodotus
Onesilus taught me two things
about the nature of history: the first is a buzz,
like that between stations in A.M radio—
cries, threnodies, words
from which the articulation is missing.
The second is a bitter aftertaste in honey,
the thought, in other words, mechanically
deposited by bees as they labour
in the empty skull.
“I was aware”, this thought says,
filling the hall of the cranium
with a voice in Minor key,
“but I didn’t really know.
I looked but did not see.
And I was born too late
too late from the start.”
Milner Place Voice Poems
‘TOP HOLD’
One of the great poems in English or anywhere in the past fifty years. I was only 22 years old when Milner Place gave me this recording in 1991. I thought that it was lost forever, until I uncovered a C90 cassette tape whilst having a declutter many moons ago, and was fortunate enough to get it transposed to a digital format recently, so I could share this prescient recording with the rest of the poetry world.
Under Construction
Under Construction
Dedication 2 poems
www.poeticareview.co.uk is back from the dead after a 6 months absence, thanks to a kind patron and friend, who put the money up to rebuild the site. We can’t tell you how relieved we are to be part of the online literary community again. Illness and loss have taken a great toll across the world, whilst the editors at POETiCA REViEW have been confined to licking their own wounds, and rebuilding the site from scratch, after a cyber attack resulted in the site being deleted from the server.
With this in mind, we pay homage to all our fellows, who have passed through this life into eternity, and dedicate this journal to their memory.
Morning near the End of August
i.m. Glenda C. for Trevor, Pat, et alia
When I think of you, only laughter
comes to mind, as I recall the many times
(half a lifetime ago) we shared
a Black Velvet or Diamond White
in the student union, before
and after class. We must’ve thought
we were quite invincible then, and certainly
more street, or savvy than our fellows.
Now, we can only dream you back,
but our memories are young as ever,
young as you always appeared
with your energy and aquamarine eyes.
Old as we are, wise words are nothing
but bits of dust, debris of spider’s webs,
the dust of life, and we professors
of arachnids come here now to dig
the living earth, and anoint you before
your next journey to the stars.
Our words are used for so many things,
but now we must use them to say,
‘farewell.’ Your shadow passes across
the window, and we’re grieving,
but there are so many words for grief.
Loss belongs to each one of us alone,
each one reaching out beyond our limits,
waiting for the leaves to turn, stirring,
silent as moths in the night air –
nothing solid as we thought it might be.
Towards the Eagle Nebula
for Pat
Just when you thought it was time
to stop mourning,
time digs another hole,
kicks your chair from under you,
ties you up in knots,
ties the noose by which you hang
as if to bury all your hope,
blind you to the stars you wish upon.
But time never banks on the maths
that turns the hourglass
on its head, the ritual act
of defiance that fills the holes
in the heart with soaring cathedrals
of cosmic dust.
Now your loss becomes an act of love
as you steady the upturned
chair, loosen the noose, unhitch
the knots of time,
in favour of the uncharted leap
into the unknown, as you look towards
the Pillars of Creation
where all our futures are yet to be reborn.
Addendum
We are more convinced than ever of our purpose. See our
Submission Guidelines in our
Need to Know
section (we are especially interested in the work of marginalised voices) and get your work into us for our next edition. All good things,
The Editors:
Mark A. Murphy
Kieran Conway
Our thanks to Pat, for all her kindness.
All Rights Reserved Kieran Conway © 2021 POETiCA REViEW Website