9. October 2013  - Huffpost published my poem, today but unfortunately, in spite of much effort on both sides of the Atlantic, they can't get the form onto their blog, so it looks strange. However, the language is still there and there is a super pic to introduce the poem on the general page.

The poem is in Huffpost 50 - a part of the Journal that focuses on older people and is published in 7 countries. What I'm proud of is that this is not a literary magazine, though literary mags. matter a lot.  But these are just Huffpost staff who decided to trawl the globe for poems they like written by people over fifty and publish them - I think the guy who chose my poem is a business editor. To be chosen here for that reason matters a lot to me - it's really encouraging to know work can be liked beyond the literary world too.

link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-byard/featured-fifty-poetry_b_3696238.html?utm_hp_ref=featured-fifty-poetry

Poem as it should look:

The Corset

That hot summer in Maine

when I was fourteen, Granny

found herself beached

in her whale-boned corset

high above the shimmering shoreline  -

our bags rugs drinks and clothes

washed up against her.

                           She sweltered

but was adamant, until the thermometer

nudged ninety and even she

had a refit to Bermuda shorts

and a top.

                          I wondered

if she'd tip over without her stays -

but she trimmed herself up

to full four feet nine inches,

and breeze belling her loose blouse

                                 sailed

straight with my little brother

through the shallows for crabbing -

        naked toes wriggling beneath.

5 October 2013

Long Guardian letter today. Link here:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/oct/04/bullying-press-death-throes-mail

Website links all working again and a few new ones added, but new design not finished yet.

Huff Post 50 poem next Wed., will put up link then. :0)

Site Maintenance

26 September 2013. Due to the usual gremlins, worms, bugs and other small beasts that lurk in the murky depths of computers, the site needs maintenance and some links are not working right now.
They will all be back up and running again soon, after a 'techier' brain than mine has had a chance to set matters right. And hopefully, with extra added new non-plastic features!

28. 8 13.
Another letter in The Guardian today - this time on the Syrian situation. It was badly cut but got a main point across. Below is the link to today's letters page, and the original text I sent in.

link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/syria-problem-responsibility-to-protect

bottom letter

Full text:

Why is money always found for wars abroad and not enough found to feed and care for our own people? How can we ever think of gathering resources and sending young people to die in yet another little understood conflict, when so many Britons are hungry, our health care is threatened, and our education system and culture is being daily trashed. When will we learn that the counties that do NOT go to foreign wars - China, Germany, the Nordic countries, Brazil, etc. - have economies that thrive?

The use of chemical weapons is appalling but so is cruise missiles, machetes, water-boardings, imprisonment without trail, etc..

Please let's stop parading on the world stage like wound-up ancient tin soldiers who don't know when or how to stop! Let's look at the motes in our own eyes first, and learn. Let's refuse to go anywhere again without a water-tight UN mandate and then only as a very small cog in a huge global exercise designed to heal Syria rather than cause further harm.

Let's force the world to move beyond war as a solution, before we lose the earth altogether! 

Have just accepted an invitation today to read at Cheltenham Poetry Festival next spring.

Also Les Murray has taken two more poems for Quadrant -

Learned in South Wales this weekend that it's a mistake to return to places which sparked my imagination as a child. Kenfig pool is not the actual location of the 'drowned town'. It is really located up beside the M4 and was covered with sand pretty quickly (Time Team did a recent quick excavation and then re-covered it).

I should love those facts too, but it was really an Anglo-Norman town, not Welsh, and I spent a lot of time on windy days listening out for the church bells under the pool!

Also, a very right wing historian who lives mostly in the US has bought Sker House and done it up. It's now in good nick but very private and can't be visited. So we can no longer sit in the old hotel bar, watch waves splash the rocks above Wrecker's Bay and shiver, imagining the old ones putting out lanterns on stormy nights to beckon unwary boats onto the rocks. It feels like a violation. There's possibly a poem about that, in a while....

Still, saw a Welsh wedding - didn't know before that Welsh men wore kilts!! Dark ones, mind and no sporran! Very smart though in wonderful Physick Garden in Cowbridge in bright sunshine, among all the colourful flowering herbs. Wish I had a life-time's knowledge of herbs - that would be worth knowing!! I bet we once rivalled the Chinese for herbal knowledge! All lost in urbanisation!

31 July. Huffington Post has chosen to publish my poem 'The Corset' in the next few weeks as part of their global campaign to find good poet voices over fifty years of age. Dead chuffed.

Another Guardian letter today- this time on the baby photo-shoot and body image. The present letters- page editors cut more than the previous ones, so my comments on the crude and brutal nature of this appalling rite got left out.  However, the basic feminist point got across.