‘One Year On’

March 27, 2021

March 25th

If you wanted to look for a mirror of all the different emotions, the heartaches, fears, fury, disbelief, warmth, solidarity, nostalgia and love experienced these last twelve months, you needn’t have looked further than the words written and read so beautifully by Rosie Johnston, Alex Josephy, Colin Pink, Jacqueline Saphra and Rob Walton.

Voices and styles so different and so complementary, painting what we have gone through so far in the pandemic with an astonishingly varied palette – confirming that we would be so much worse off without poetry!

If anyone who was part of the large audience attending on the 25th is reading this and wishes to send me (irena@in-words.co.uk) comments on, even a short review of, all or part of the evening, please come forward, don’t be shy! I am so involved in the whole event that it takes me a while to put finger to keyboard and write anything sensible….

In the meanwhile, here are the short biographies of the readers, and information on how to get in touch with them and/or purchase their publications.

Rosie Johnston‘s four poetry books are published by Lapwing Publications in her native Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019, a description in 17-syllable stanzas of the inner landscape of post-traumatic stress disorder. Last December top Irish poetry blogger Billy Mills chose it as one of his top three Irish poetry books of 2020.  Rosie’s poems have appeared or featured in the Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Hedgerow. Anthologies include Live Canon’s ‘154 Project: In Response to Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (2016), Her Other Language published by Arlen House in 2020 and the Northern Irish section of Places of Poetry (OneWorld, 2020). Before being distracted by poetry, Rosie had two novels published, in London and Dublin. For this event read the first fiction she has written in over ten years. You can find her and her books online at www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com

Alex Josephy lives in London and Italy. Her collection Naked Since Faversham was published by Pindrop Press in 2020 (http://www.pindroppress.com). Other work includes White Roads, poems set in Italy (Paekakariki Press, 2018, https://www.paekakarikipress.com), and Other Blackbirds (Cinnamon Press, 2016, https://www.cinnamonpress.com). Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and Italy. As part of the Poetry School Mixed Borders scheme, she has been poet-in-residence at Rainham Hall, Essex, and in Markham Square, London.  Find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net. Her books can be ordered from the publishers, or for signed copies email Alex on alex@alexjosephy.net.

Colin Pink’s poems and fiction have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and anthologies. His first book of poems, Acrobats of Sound, was published in 2016 (by Poetry Salzburg Press) and The Ventriloquist Dummy’s Lament, a pamphlet of 21 villanelles, with woodcuts by Daniel Goodwin, was published in 2019 (by Against the Grain Press). He is having two new collections published this year: Wreck of the Jeanne Gougy another pamphlet published by Paekakariki with woodcut illustrations by Daniel Goodwin and Typicity, his second full-length collection, to be published by Dempsey and Windle in April. You can obtain copies of his books directly from Colin by emailing him on colinpinkconsulting@gmail.com or order them from the publisher’s websites. Visit Colin’s Facebook page to see announcements: https://www.facebook.com/colin.pink.37/

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye 2011) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2014) won the Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. All My Mad Mothers (Nine Arches Press 2017) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Two of her sonnet sequences A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller (2017) and Veritas: Poems After Artemisia (2020) are published by Hercules Editions. Her third collection, Dad, Remember You Are Dead was published by Nine Arches Press in 2019. She read from her latest book, One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets, published in February 2021 by Nine Arches Press. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet, lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School.

Scunthorpe-born Rob Walton lives in Whitley Bay.  His poetry has been published by The Emma Press, Strix, The Interpreter’s House, Sidekick Books, Frances Lincoln, Macmillan and others.  His works of fiction have been published in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada and New Zealand.  Arachne Press has just published his debut poetry collection, This Poem Here, with a launch the night before our reading! He collated the New Hartley Memorial Pathway text.  You can follow him on Twitter: @anicelad. 

Events

TUESDAY MARCH 25 at West Greenwich Library, 7.30 – ‘Mica Press launch: new poetry from Rosie Johnston, Michael Vince and Antony Johae.’ With Nayma Chamchoun, Michael Foley and Leslie Bell.

An evening of poetry from six very different voices. Here’s something about them:

Leslie Bell was born in Scotland and spent his boyhood on Tyneside, in Finland, and in Scotland. While studying in Washington D.C.,  he came across Dante’s La Vita Nuova and promptly decided to ‘read’ English Literature instead of History at King’s College, Cambridge. His working career has been varied to say the least: he made an educational filmstrip on Elizabethan theatres, sold ice cream, worked as a hospital porter, auxiliary nurse, carpenter and plasterer, potato salesman, English teacher, drama student, printer, bookshop assistant, systems programmer in university web support and e-learning, and support worker with autistic adults. In 2012 Les founded Mica Press & Campanula Books in Wivenhoe, Essex, where he has lived since 1978. At Mica he edits and publishes poetry and non-fiction. His own poems have appeared in many magazines and in the anthology Days begin… (ed. Peter Kennedy, Wivenbooks, 2016). Archipelagos, poems by Leslie Bell, (Mica Press, 2012) is available in paperback from https://micapress.uk/ .

Nayma Chamchoun is a British Moroccan writer, poet and performance poet. Her writing is influenced by her cultural duality. She is interested in female voices in the diaspora communities, the challenges they face within them, especially around the taboos surrounding mental health. Nayma is an active member of London’s vibrant Poetry and Spoken Word community, the international Poetry community online and has performed her work at several Poetry Open Mic events including the one marking Grenfell 5 year Anniversary, Women Writing Lockdown Exhibition at the House of Commons. Her work was featured on West Wiltshire Radio & BBC Radio London several times. Nayma’s first poetry collection COVID: THE WORDY WILDS OF A MIND UNDER LOCKDOWN was published to critical acclaim in 2022. Her second collection, Saging Not Ageing, was published on June 1st 2024.

Michael Foley is a Northern Irish writer who lives in London, where he worked as a Lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Westminster before taking early retirement to concentrate on writing. He has published four novels, four philosophy books and six poetry books, including New and Selected Poems (Blackstaff Press 2011) and, most recently, a long poem, The Whole Thing (Mica Press 2023). Plenty to read about him and details of all his books on his website michael-foley.net. 

Antony Johae gained a Ph.D from the University of Essex with a comparative study of Dostoevsky and Kafka. His book Franz Kafka, Maker of Dreams will be published this year by Cambridge Scholars. Antony has taught literature in Ghana, Tunisia and Kuwait. He retired in 2009 and now divides his time between Colchester and Lebanon (his wife’s country of origin). Since retiring, he has published four poetry collections: Poems of the East (Gipping Press, 2015); After-Images: Homage to Eric Rohmer (Poetry Salzburg, 2019); Ex-Changes (The High Window, 2020); Home Poems (Orphean Press, 2022), and most recently the pamphlet Foreign Forays: Poems of Travel in Europe and the Med, from which he will be reading at the event. Palewell Press, which specialises in works on refugees, human rights and ecology, will bring out Antony’s prose collection Lines on Lebanon later this year.

Rosie Johnston’s writing spans journalism, drama, fiction and poetry, with novels published in Dublin and London and four books of poetry by Lapwing Publications in her native Belfast. Six-Count Jive (Lapwing, 2019), describes the inner landscape of her complex post-traumatic stress disorder and led to readings at Glasgow and Vigo universities and inclusion in Her Other Language (Arlen House, 2020). Rosie’s poetry also appears in the Northern Irish section of Places of Poetry (OneWorld, 2020), the Mary Evans Poems and Pictures blog and various magazines. Her first venture back into fiction in ten years, Laughing and Grief, was published in American Writers Review. Rosie will be reading from her fifth book of poetry, Safe Ground, just published by Mica Press. Rosie reviews poetry for London Grip and is a generous and inspirational teacher and mentor. rosiejohnstonwrites.com

Michael Vince taught in Italy and the UK before emigrating to Greece in 1977 where he worked in language teaching, teacher education, and materials writing.  His son Alex grew up in Athens, and lives there still with his Greek family, so Greece is a large part of his life still, and some of his poems are set there. Michael has published a lot of ELT textbooks of various kinds with Heinemann and Macmillan, and has been a freelance author since 1988. Since returning to the UK in 1994 he has lived mainly in different parts of London, and tends to write himself into anywhere new. He now lives in Greenwich, which features a lot in the poems of Back to Life. Since the 1960s his poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, and his collections include: The Orchard Well, Carcanet 1978; Mountain, Epic and Dream, Hunting Raven 1981; In The New District, Carcanet 1982; Gaining Definition, R L Barth 1986;  Plain Text, Mica Press 2015, Long Distance, Mica Press 2020,  A Conversation with George Seferis, Rack Press 2022, Back to Life, Mica Press 2023, and Legwork Mica Press 2024. At present (2025) he is writing poems mainly about Water.

Doors will open at 7 for a 7.30 start. Refreshments and books available. Free event, all welcome.

TUESDAY MAY 13 at West Greenwich Library – ‘Maggie and Maggie’. Same name, different voices: poetry from Maggie Butt and Maggie Harris.

TUESDAY JUNE 24 at West Greenwich Library – ‘Telltale Poets: Sarah Barnsley, Robin Houghton and Peter Kenny’