I really thought of it as a lucky fluke when I managed to place three poems in POETRY magazine last year, so you can't imagine my face when I got an email last week from Don Share to say he is going to publish my six-part Mary Stuart sequence in an upcoming issue!!

To say I'm delighted is an understatement. I'm so thankful to Don Share for his willingness to give new and unknown writers like me publication in POETRY - his support of new writers in the hallowed (to me!) pages of POETRY magazine is so incredibly encouraging and surprising in the often closed and cliquey world of poetry publication.

I have a couple of poems online in The Lake - a great monthly poetry webzine, I also have a poem coming out this month in the autumn issue of Paris Lit Up - one magazine launch party I so wish I could make it to! I have a poem coming out in a Scottish issue of the Atlanta Review next spring, I think, which I'm also excited about.

So many more poems submitted and of course many many many rejections have come in...

Four weeks of the kids being back at school and I'm only now feeling the stirrings of poems, again I want to work with a theme / themes to explore through many poems rather than jump from isolated poem to isolated poem. I have a few ideas but nothing as concrete and exact as the pier sequence. Still reading D.H. Lawrence, whose poems I love the more I read! 

Thankful for an honest and thoughtful blog review of Tree Language here.

I'm excited to say that a series of my new poems will be published later this year in a collection featuring two other poets also. I'll write more details when it's all been finalised.
My section is going to be called The Birth Garden and will be prefaced with this quote from Euripides' Medea -
"I would rather stand three times in a battle line than give birth to one child".

As the title suggests, the poems are very much intermingled birth and garden poems. I was really excited at how well the birth and garden poems worked together when I was putting together the selection for the book. I thought I would move away from the bloodiness of Tree Language but I'm afraid these poems are rather bloody too!
I was really taken with the concept of Twilight Sleep - an induced amnesia so that the body remembers the pain of childbirth but the mind doesn't - and also how birthing women were ill-treated during the process.

Not quite sure what to move onto next with my poems. I've recently got very much into D. H. Lawrence's poems - I have no idea why they are not so widely applauded, some of them seem incredible to me. I wrote an odd tulip poem very much under Lawrence's influence and I liked the different tone to it so maybe that's an area I can push further.

Have dozens of submissions out - hope some of them take. My longish three part Lot's Wife poem will be in the New York based online journal Transmissions in March.