NEXT ISSUE OF SMITHS KNOLL

Issue 47 was mailed out to subscribers and contributors in December 2010. We’re currently taking poems for inclusion in Smiths Knoll 48 which we anticipate will be available in the late spring or early summer of 2011. Here’s a poem already accepted for the next issue, by Mavis Howard, a poet we’ve never published before.

Darkling

Every third week she goes to Guy’s and St Thomas’s
where Keats qualified to be an apothecary.
His certificate’s displayed at the house in Hampstead
where the nightingale sang as he sat in darkness
under a plum tree.

She went out shopping for a well-fitting wig just in case.
Would JK’s bedside manner have been reassuring?
She’s twice twenty-five. Write it in water.
There are blue plums in her garden. A sparrow
pecks at them and chirps.

Mavis Howard

The Touch by Tom Duddy, published in Smiths Knoll 45, was one of the highly commended poems selected for inclusion in this year’s Forward Book of Poetry. Congratulations to him.

Hearing Ourselves Think, Philip Hancock’s pamphlet, the third in our Smiths Knoll Mentorship series, was chosen by Craig Raine as one of his Books of the Year: ‘Hearing Ourselves Think by Philip Hancock (Smiths Knoll) is crammed with unpoetic qualia from the world of City and Guilds. Hancock left school at 16 to take up an apprenticeship. Twenty-odd years ago, the former probation officer Simon Armitage founded the Democratic People's Republic of Poetry. Hancock is a citizen – with a commonsense understanding that technical drawing, Halfords, The Dukes of Hazzard, Everton Mints and Frank Spencer can hold their own in poetry.’ Guardian Books of the Year, 27 November 2010