Poetry Foucault’s Pendulum by Michael Arthur make deft use of rhythm and rich imagery to bestow a message of hope through constant change. To take then you do it so easily so take again it is yours to have an opening it gleams in your mind like fresh cut grass from the meadow of your …
Poetry In this lavishly beautiful work of nature poetry, Deborah Benson reflects on the ruin of a Threshing Machine and its reclamation by nature. Your tenacious nameplate continues to resist dissolution, in the gentle grass of this little broom filled valley on Strathfinella Hill. Still holding together your bleached boards though they are splitting. You …
Non-Fiction Following Tracks explores beauty in the quotidian, extracting poetic pleasure from everyday scenes and objects encountered on a coastal walk. Featuring photography from Dean Smith. Knowing how way leads on to way Robert Frost A mammal swells and circles and lays him down. You and I …
Poetry Once Upon A Time compares the passage of time with the turning of the night sky, the stars showing transience as well as permanence. I used to watch with you And now the galaxy seems too big To contain those times when we walked hand in hand How can distance be measured By the …
Non-Fiction Et In Argot Ego is a genre-leaping essay which delivers a passionate defence, and celebration with relish, of the English language’s reflexivity. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the cases for and against those who stand before you. You have heard that while they admit they have been seen, heard and …
Poetry Reflecting upon a tasty yet unsettling meal, Margiotta depicts a point of moral uncertainty asking, what does it mean to eat an octopus? I ate an octopus eyeing the menu I’m a sucker for cephalopod, I said ha, see what I did there? and when it came an exquisite swirl of ruby limbs …
Poetry Michael Arthur’s poem renders the emotional space after love as a desolate wasteland littered with lost artefacts, a shadow place. Maps of old familiar territory Dead leaves blowing Swirling in a dusty corner A single songbird bursts forth melodically I open that first edition you gave me And read again Entranced by the familiar …
Poetry Marka Rifat uses a visit to a river as a metaphor to explore anxieties around the climate crisis by musing on the transience of nature. The metaphors are running dry: you can step in the same river twice, indeed, as often as you fancy, if you like standing in the shaming dust of drought. …
Non-Fiction Marka Rifat returns to the Leopard Arts pages with another thought provoking essay with Here’s a Tip a short musing on tipping in Theatres. The theatre, remember that? Over the hubbub of voices, assuring the harassed woman at the reception desk that you really do have four tickets to collect and, as the growing …
Non-Fiction Try Reading essay reflects upon the mundanity of lockdown and considers an approach taken by Poet laureate Simon Armitage. “…from a creative point of view, everything has just become a little bit overfamiliar,” observed poet laureate Simon Armitage (8 May edition of the Guardian Review) and this has been a common enough comment since …
