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! 

Happy New Year!!

I read somewhere that 2014 is the year of the death of blogging. Whilst I don't think that's true - there are loads of regularly updated excellent poetry blogs out there - the role of blogging, for me, has changed over the last couple of years.

I initially set up this blog under a pseudonym as an outlet for my writing with the hope of meeting like-minded readers and writers and the hope of improving my writing. The results were far beyond my expectations. I found a creative community of people who inspired, encouraged and taught me so much. However because of magazines' stricter conceptions of 'publication' and not being able to post up  first drafts of poems, the blog has turned into an irregular newsy update on poetry publications etc.
I'm not sure of the future function of blogs like these as Facebook and Twitter have taken over the creative community aspect of blogging.

Anyway, my dream start to 2014 of having poems published in this month's Poetry magazine alongside such poets as Jane Hirshfield and Emily Berry has come true, much to my continuing utter amazement. You can read this month's mag here and listen to the podcast here where my poems are described as Homeric (!!!!!!) with reference being made to Yeats (!!!!!!!!). Always embarrassing hearing yourself read and I was pretty nervous but I'm so completely delighted at Don Share's and Lindsay Garbutt's
lovely comments on my poems. The rest of the year can sink into oblivion and it'll still be the best year ever!

 
   

Just had the most utterly amazing news, I can barely believe it...

Poetry magazine have accepted three of my poems for publication!!!
I could never in my wildest dreams have imagined being published in that most amazing and historically significant magazine.

I met Don Share, the editor of Poetry, at the Eyewear launch in London last week, where I read my Arrochar Alps poem. He liked it so much he wanted to publish it plus another couple of poems from my forthcoming collection.

I'm gobsmacked to say the least. It was great to hear him read plus hear and meet some other Eyewear poets. We all went for dinner afterwards at a lovely, cosy Italian restaurant where I had a good chance to chat with the other poets.

No more poetry plans for the next couple of months so I'll be able to start catching up with blogs and blogging a bit and maybe even some housework too!!