Poetry Life and Times

Closing Time at Laugharne.Poem.Marie Marshall.Sonnet.

February 11, 2019May 17, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

I miss you – yes I do, you boozy Celt!

I’ve half a mind to hear you spin a yarn

While you, with pints of stout beneath your belt,

Traipse homewards through the rainy streets of Laugharne,

From Brown’s Hotel, where we propped up the bar

Till closing time. What’s closing time to me

Or you? Come on ― the Boathouse isn’t far ―

Down to the sloe black, slow, black, crow black sea!

There’s pen and paper ready for your muse,

A bottle, and some glasses for a toast,

We’ll sit, and laugh, and rhyme a while, and booze ―

But, Duw, dear lad, you’re nothing but a ghost!

–Can such as you go, gentle, into night,

–Or did you rage against that dying light?

Marie Marshall (1957 — ) is an Anglo-Scottish author, poet and editor. Her first collection of poems, Naked in the Sea, was published in 2010 and reviewed in Sonnetto Poesia that same year, and her second collection, I am not a fish, in 2013. Since 2005 she has published over two hundred poems, mainly in magazines and anthologies, but the most extraordinary places in which a poem of hers has appeared include on the wall of a café in Wales, and etched into an African drum at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her first novel, Lupa, was published in 2012. She is well-known in Scotland for her macabre short stories. Her web site can be found at mairibheag.com. Of writing poetry and sonnets she says, “I did not start writing until 2004, so I am very much a twenty-first century writer. I write anything, any kind of poetry that I feel the urge to tackle ― sonnets included.”

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

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Iliad, Book XVIII. Poem.Sonnet. Esther Cameron

February 11, 2019May 15, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

The Iliad stands on the shelf beside

The breakfast table, a bookmark slowly making

Its way through, as those ancient revenants glide

Across yet one more screen, their gestures vacant

Of so much we have known. No arch or column

For them, no schools that labored to explain,

No Phidias has poised the body’s volume

Nor vase-painter contained it in a line.

Their bodies are the only forms there are,

Their gods that come and go like flaws of wind

The only spirit. Conscience and eye are clear,

Unshadowed by a thought of having sinned.

Their poet, though, had guessed invention’s force ―

Had seen robots, and automatic doors.

Esther Cameron (1941 — ) (a.k.a. E. Kam-Ron) is Editor-in-Chief of The Deronda Review (derondareview.org) and also has a multifaceted website, pointandcircumference.com. She has a PhD. and a J.D; her sonnets have appeared in B’Or Ha’Torah, Bellowing Ark, The Lyric, Sonnetto Poesia, The Susquehanna Review and Voices Israel, among others. Recent publications include Fortitude or the Lost Language of Justice: Poems in Israel’s Cause (Bitzaron, 2009) and a sonnet sequence, To Guard the Soul of Youth, in B’Or Ha’Torah 21. She is also one of the translators in a collection of Reuven Ben-Yosef’s poems, On the Bridge (Bitzaron, 2011). She was the judge of the 2011 Reuben Rose competition. She has written sonnets since the age of fifteen and feels that the form has mystic properties as well as being an efficient container of information.

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

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On a Night like Ovid.Poem.Constance Rowell Mastores.Sonnet

February 11, 2019May 14, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Every night he slipped the story on

like a second self, like a silk chemise his wife

once wore, like sepals overlapped around a bud,

like new bark on green skin, like a boy

in love with flowers— so naturally did it fit.

In the morning, the dream unraveled. It unspooled

and ran like water. His mind could not retrieve one pebble.

…..…

The sun blew over him. He felt a chill.

Like a re-run of a classic. Someone had sold out,

was being hunted down, was running through the streets

of an old city, hopping a tram in the nick

of time, traveling backward, changing into something

more comfortable—the body of a girl, who fled

into the same irresistible sorrow, night after night.

Constance Rowell Mastores (1938— ) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley. She has graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkeley. She is a classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice. She and her husband, Kent “Nick” Mastores, live in Oakland, California. On her own poetry, she has this to say, “Rarely do I set out to write a 14 liner. Over the years, however, I have noticed that the poems I write that do result in 14 liners are preceded by a flow of sound— and sometimes a slight tingling in my fingers. The next stage is a fusion of emotion and idea set to some sort of rhythmical pattern. The words themselves may be born of depression; or of a keen observation of something in nature that has deeply moved me. In all cases, when I realize that I have resolved what I have to say in fourteen lines, I am incredibly happy.” Constance’s poetry appears in Paws & Tales, an anthology of poetry about animals, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, a book of selected poems, to be published by Blue Light Press in 2013; and in journals such as The Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Chronicles, The Comstock Review, Correspondences, The Deronda Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Lyric, The Magnolia Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rattapallax and Visions International.

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from: Richard Vallance, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. 30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: http://vallance22.hpage.com/ for further information.

***

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Ophelia.Poem.Sonnet.Sara L Russell

February 11, 2019May 10, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Hamlet: Act III, Scene I. A Room in the Castle

Ophelia

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck’d the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh

That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth

Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

William Shakespeare (1564―1616):

Adrift amid the bindweed, through the reeds,

Watching the sky with deep unblinking eyes,

She passes where the turquoise mayfly feeds,

Oblivious of all that swims or flies.

Red flowered chiffon billows to her hands

Open like water lilies in the sun,

Her skin’s the colour of tropical sands,

Her russet hair shines bright as copper spun.

Fabulous jewels languish on her breast,

Rich spoils of love rendered useless in death,

Her parted lips make unspoken behest;

The rosy portal of her final breath.

Now all is cold where roiling passion flamed,

As jealous earth mourns what the river claimed.

Sara Louise Russell , whose internet name is “PinkyAndrexa”, is a UK poet who has earned a well-deserved reputation as a highly respected twenty-first century poetry publisher and poet. She was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Life & Times, one of the world’s premier poetry E-zines, which ran monthly from 1998-2006 under her tutelage. She has always been in on the scene with graphic design, animation, 3D art, web design, sign writing, photography, film and poetry recital videos. Sara is founder and current editor of Poetry Lifetimes and the online Ning network The Video Poets. Her poetry has been published in Artvilla, AuthorsDen, Hello Poetry, The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry (Describe Adonis Press, Ottawa, © 2005), Sonnetto Poesia, Word Machinist and more, as well as in several e-books by Kedco Studios Inc. (USA). Her skills as a sonneteer are particularly remarkable.

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

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Painting Ophelia John Millais

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Sea Song of the Crazy Poet.Poem.Sonnet.Sondra Ball(Deceased2010)

February 11, 2019May 8, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

It’s been a long time since I wrote a song.

I used to write beside the bay at night.

The music made me feel much less alone.

Night shadows forced a lashing, screaming fright.

Music was comforting. I’d sit and write

Until the sun wove light forms on the sea.

Then dawn would bind the shadows. I was free.

At last my music grew completely clear.

Then shadows shattered every pitch and rhyme.

They scream and dance. No note can stop my fear.

My loneliness grows with the measured time.

The shades are odorous. They smell like brine

The sea has tossed with rotting fish and shell,

Or like dead music, a stillborn dream or tale.

Sondra Ball (deceased March 17 2010) touched the lives of many with her passion, spirituality, intuition, outspokenness, and love. Born in Kentucky to migrant workers, an active Quaker and child of the Creek Nation, Sondra was passionate about race relations as well as the environment. An accomplished and passionate poet and writer, Sondra published the online poetry journal, Autumn Leaves, where she took great pleasure in encouraging new voices, especially among children and Native Americans. Sondra has been published many times in several anthologies, E-zines, journals and sites, such as Canadian Zen Haiku canadien ISSN 1705-4508, Matrifocus, Poetry of the Desert ISBN 0974197548, Spirits in Peace (see Richard Doiron) and Sonnetto Poesia.

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian

http://vallance22.hpage.com/

Conformal Mapping.Poem.Sonnet.Vera Rich(1936-2009)

May 28, 2020May 2, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

I cannot come to you without a sleep,

And travelling through sleep, I cannot know

If through one firm continuum I go.

Night is an involution which may keep

Strange secrets, map our plane from sphere to sphere,

And though we travel post-stage, can we swear

Nights in strange inns preserve invariant “there”

And “thither”? One brief day embeds our “near”.

So, meeting, can we claim a mundane path

Maps me to you in spatial translation?

Rise with the dawn – however swift we run,

Time draws its radius around each hearth,

And hence we meet, sped by night’s transformation

Where children dream gold lands beyond the sun.

***

Vera Rich(1936-2009)

Educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and at Bedford College, London, Vera Rich, a respected science journalist and a tireless campaigner for human rights, was a fine poet. Her wits were quick, her memory prodigious and she had a wonderful sense of humour.

During the 1960’s she had three books of her own poems published, and founded the poetry magazine, Manifold. This ran with some success for 28 issues before publication was suspended in 1968, when Vera became Eastern European correspondent for the science magazine, Nature.

Once asked to translate some Ukrainian poems, she learned the language to do so. For the next three decades, she travelled extensively in eastern Europe, becoming the foremost translator of both Ukrainian and Belarusian poetry into English. She reported on the activities of dissident Soviet scientists, the Chernobyl disaster, psychiatric abuse and AIDS in the Soviet Union. Her anthology of Belarusian poetry, Like Water, Like Fire, published by UNESCO, was subsequently withdrawn under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Manifold, which she revived in 1998, regularly published foreign-language poetry with parallel text in Engtlish and, occasionally. foreign poetry untranslated. In 2006 Vera travelled to the Ukraine to receive the Ivan Franko Award for her 40 years service to the translation of Ukrainian poetry. While on a visit to the Ivan Franko Homestead she gave an emotional reading of Shevchenko’s poem “Testament”. On her next visit in 2007, she wore her medal, the Order of Princess Olha, which had been presented to her at the Ukrainian Embassy in London. Vera could fairly be described as a Ukrainian patriot, an unusual distinction for an Englishwoman.

In 2006 Vera underwent treatment for breast cancer. But she always insisted her illness was an inconvenient obstacle to her work. On 18 December 2009, her doctor advised her to go into hospital, but even then Vera gave priority to her translations. On 20 December, 2009, she died peacefully in her bed. She will be greatly missed, not least for her kindness and the support she gave to so many. Alan Flowers (UK)

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This sonnet and bibliography is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

Winter Departure.Poem. Sonnet.Trina Gayon

February 11, 2019April 29, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

The early light reflects the short gray hairs

among the brown, and still he’s just a boy

of twenty-five, who rises slowly, turns

to stare down at the bed where she coils

asleep, the dreamless sleep that only comes

on nights when he has filled her up with rain.

He brought it with him out of Dublin slums,

to blanket California hills in gray

soft shrouds. He waits for gold to turn to green.

He lingers over tea and toast until

he’s read the Times. Packing his bag to leave;

he has no ties to things that keep her still

beneath their weight ― a job, this house, her car.

It’s almost Christmas, and Ireland’s not so far.

***

Trina Gaynon is a graduate of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of San Francisco. She currently volunteers in Los Angeles with WriteGirl, providing workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing, and works with a literacy program in her community. Recently, her poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, Runes, 26, Southeast Review and the anthology Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront and Yemassee. She says, “My deeply divided personality moves back and forth between writing sonnets, a way of exploring what I have to say, and more experimental work, a way of exploding into what I need to say.”

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

The Wife of Pain.Poem.Sonnet.Becca Menon

February 11, 2019April 21, 2013 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

***

I’ve learned deceptiveness since he moved in:

How to distract him from a brutal rage or try

To trick his jealous need for all of my

Attention — yet defend him when I grin

Contentedly for loved-ones who suspect

His secret violence; to take the blame

For something that I’ve done or some neglect

That sets him off, and hide the sticky shame

I feel for letting him destroy my life.

And while it never stops confounding me

To realize that it’s true I am his wife,

There’s one thing that I face with honesty:

Because it was by illness we were wed,

This demon, Pain, will always share my bed.

***

Becca Menon (1958― ) of New York City writes formal, often narrative poetry that makes use of both received and nonce forms. Her verse novel A Girl and Her Gods (2008) led poet Katha Pollitt to declare “No poet I know of writes anything like this ― Becca dances to a tune of her own Panpipes, and the reader follows, entranced,” while Herb Leibowitz, Editor of Parnassus, wrote that her “language is supple and nuanced {and} her sleight-of-hand as a story-teller keeps the reader from worry about what technical devices she uses;…” Poet Mark Rudman, editor of Pequod, noted that her poetry is “playful, philosophical, and subversive.” Also a translator and prize-winning author of nonsense, Becca has works appearing in numerous print and on-line journals, both nationally and internationally. To learn more, please visit BeccaBooks.com

***

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself.

Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.

http://vallance22.hpage.com/

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