We asked for your favourite poems from the last 69 issues. Thank you to everyone who sent in their choices. Here’s a selection of your suggestions…
– Like A Sonnet – Sharon Olds, Issue 54
– The Cows – Jenny King, Issue 62
– They Come and They Go – Geraldine Mitchell, Issue 61
– Goodbye – Gill Rennard, Issue 1
– Blackberrying – Ramona Herdman, Issue 57
– ‘Haibun’ – Dorothy Nimmo, Issue 28 with reflections from Jane Routh
– ‘ON THE BUSES’ WITH DOSTOYEVSKY – Geoff Hattersley, Issue 16/17 with reflections from Alan Payne
Like A Sonnet – Sharon Olds, Issue 54
Chosen by Greta Nintzel
1963 – Meg Cox, Issue 66
Chosen by Marilyn Francis
The Cows – Jenny King, Issue 62
Chosen by Susan Bedford
They Come and They Go – Geraldine Mitchell, Issue 61
Chosen by Judith Thurley
Goodbye – Gill Rennard, Issue 1
Chosen by John Lancaster
Blackberrying – Ramona Herdman, Issue 57
Chosen by Jo Peters
‘Haibun’ – Dorothy Nimmo, Issue 28
Jane Routh writes about her choice:
Poetry magazines overflow their allocated shelf-space at an alarming rate. You pile a few on top for a year or two, then start a stack on the floor, another on the stairs. When you can never find the one you’re looking for, it’s probably best to admit the time has come…
but the The North I’ll always keep is number 28.
This one’s from 2021 and has in it the last poem Dorothy Nimmo published. She died the same year; the poem appears nowhere else. That in itself makes it of value, but the poem ‘Haibun’ is – on the face of it – unlike anything else she wrote. She uses the haibun form to pack together seven self-questioning paragraphs each with its own haiku-like retort.
I said ‘on the face of it’, because interrogating her own thoughts and actions was part of how she worked.
It is the first time she used this form. She was always interested in finding new ways to work, in experimenting, in challenging herself. The American poet Sheila Murphy introduced Dorothy to haibun in the spring of 2000, when she went to Exeter, working in group with Rupert Loydell. “There was so much going on I had to get up at 6am to work”, she wrote…
Chosen by Jane Routh
‘ON THE BUSES’ WITH DOSTOYEVSKY by Geoff Hattersley, Issue 16/17
Alan Payne writes about his choice:
I love the wit of this poem, which touches on industrial damage and decline, popular culture, family life, and the beginnings of a life-long interest in reading. It conjures all those ‘second narratives’ which are especially poignant in adolescence. I love the simplicity and resonance of the final lines, and the way the end of the penultimate line wrong-foots the reader. A poem about beginnings and endings which has stayed in my mind for many years.
Chosen by Alan Payne
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