Posted on

Announcing morphrog 31

morphrog 31, with poetry and prose by twenty new and established writers and photographs by Peter Stewart, is now live at www.morphrog.com

morphrog, now in its 16th year, originally focussed on ‘poetry in the extreme’ but has recently expanded its field of interest to include translations, short prose fiction, photographs and other visual images, narratives of reminiscence, dream and memory, and other creative media. morphrog is a bi-annual publication, appearing in July and January.

Here is a taste of the latest edition:

James Piatt

All The Lonely People

Harvard University researchers…
discovered that loneliness is as
deadly as smoking. (8/24/2016)
And 51% of adults worldwide feel lonely
Meta-Gallup Survey (10/24/2023)

All the lonely people, with
forlorn memories screaming
inside their minds filled with
an unquenchable sadness,
stagger against the
turbulent winds that blow
the bitterness of today’s
images of misery into their
lives.

Dark images awakened by
voices of shadow people,
cause their torn emotions of
despair to fall into the
turbulence of a melancholy
absurdity.

As hopelessness soars in the
sky’s vastness, all the lonely
people try to stifle the
darkness of the smoldering
shadows laced with cold
contradictions. Their gloom
filled minds resist the
soothing symphony of
fiddling crickets playing in
the ebony hours of the
night.

An old man senses pulses of
darkness trapped inside
dust and old memories,
soaring in the coarseness of
merciless time.
He wanders aimlessly during
the empty hours of the
night’s savage time, trying
to escape the metallic air
embedded with invisible nails
being hammered into his
rusted memories. Like all
the other lonely
people, he senses, his
memories are knifing their
way into anguish.

His happy times are
unraveling threads of
reality, and he finds his
sliver of memories, like
shreds of bleached bones,
are staggering over illusions
veiled in a painful and
dismal unreality.

Like all the lonely people,
his memories are emerging
with the sharp bitterness of
lingering tears, and his
mind, like theirs, is walking
through whispers of fear
puncturing his sad thoughts
with world sorrows.

James Piatt is a nonagenarian poet and novelist. He lives in California in a replica 1900s eastern farmhouse with his wife Sandy, and dog Scout. 

Posted on

morphrog 29 lands

The 29th edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com. Contributors are:

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, retired mathematician and current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip. His latest collection is Identified Flying Objects (Shoestring, 2024).

Tom Barwell Poet, psychotherapist and coach Tom Barwell. Recently published in Does It Have Pockets and Poetica Review.

James Owens whose poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Channel, Arc, Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and Atlanta Review. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in Ontario, Canada. His latest publication is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020).

Gordon Scapens, widely published over many years in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions, most recently winning the Brian Nesbit Poetry Award.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. He lives in Mumbai, India.

John Short lives near Liverpool again after a previous life in southern Europe. He reads at venues in Liverpool, Chester and beyond. His work has appeared in over 80 magazines and anthologies, and he was a Pushcart nominee in 2018. His latest poetry collection is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus, 2023).

J.S. Watts is a British poet and novelist who weaves the fantastical and the literary with other vibrant strands to create glowing, multi-faceted writing. Originally from London, she now lives in Cambridgeshire. Her three poetry collections, Cats and Other Myths, Years Ago You Coloured Me and Underword, are published by Lapwing Publications, as is her multi-award nominated SF poetry pamphlet, Songs of Steelyard Sue. Her novels are published in the US and UK by Vagabondage Press.

Submissions are invited for morphrog 30, which will be published in January.

Posted on

The Papers’ 103rd edition in their 41st year

Cover art by Arusyak Pivazyan, inspired Paul Truan’s poem ‘Tones’

The Frogmore Papers’ 103rd edition is published this month. It’s another international number, featuring a striking cover by Armenian artist Arusyak Pivazyan (inspired by a poem from Cornish poet Paul Truan), translations of Georges Brassens by Michael Swan and the Belgian poet Marc Tritsmans by John Irons, poems by Peter Bakowski (Australia) and Christine Hennemann (Ireland) and a short story by Stephen Silvester (Canada). Closer to home, there is also work by Mike Barlow, Vuyelwa Carlin, John Greening, Stuart Henson, Myra Schneider, Paul Stephenson and a host of others. ‘From the Archive’ features a 1997 poem by Tobias Hill, who, sadly, died last year. Several of his early poems appeared in the Papers, and Tobias was awarded the Frogmore Prize in 1995 by Linda France for his poem ‘Flora and the Admiral’.

The Frogmore Papers are available post-free (£5.00) from The Frogmore Press or from Skylark, the independent bookshop in the Needlemakers, Lewes. Subscription rates to the Papers have remained at £10.00 for one year, £15.00 for two years since 2010.

Posted on

Kokopelli looms large in morphrog’s 28th number 

The 28th edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com  In addition to new work by Yorkshire poets Jenny Hockey and A D W Kerr, California-based James Piatt and Geoffrey Winch, awarded the accolade of the UK’s best Small Press Poet by Purple Patch magazine in 2011, morphrog 28 features an extended sequence of poems about Kokopelli, the joker god of the Native American pantheon in the South-Western United States, by renowned poet, translator and grammarian Michael Swan, a former winner of the Times’ Stephen Spender Prize.  

Submissions are invited for morphrog 29, which will go live in July.  

Posted on

Poetry Prize adjudicator announced

Adjudicator announced

The 38th Frogmore Poetry Prize will be adjudicated by writer and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature Graham Mort. Graham is the author of ten full-length poetry collections, most recently Black Shiver Moss (Seren, 2017)  and three collections of short fiction, most recently Like Fado and Other Stories (Salt, 2021). He has also written BBC radio drama. Graham has read his work widely across the UK and overseas in South Africa, Uganda, Vietnam and China. 

The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2024. Full details at:  http://www.frogmorepress.co.uk/frogmore-poetry-prize

This year’s Prize (2023), adjudicated by Helena Nelson, was won by Lynda Plater with her poem ‘The Revd. Michael Woolf on his way to a parishioner in need’. Runners-up were Alison Binney and Christopher Horton.

Posted on

morphrog 27 goes live

The latest edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com, featuring poetry and prose by a roster of contributors from around the world. Work by familiar names – Angela Arnold, Ian Heffernan, Gordon Scapens, Gerald Seniuk, Ian C Smith, Rodney Wood – is complemented by contributions from newcomers Ben Banyard, Salvatore Difalco, Vyarka Kozareva, Massimiliano Nastri, James Owens, the pseudonymous sds and John White, whose poem ‘Picnic at St Catherine’s Guidlford’ is accompanied by a photograph of the event itself by Fred Pipes.

Number 27 is an especially varied edition, including as it does a  long poem about the story of Ukraine by Canadian poet Gerald Seniuk, himself of Ukrainian heritage, Ian Heffernan’s poems inspired by the work of Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai and republication of Luigi Coppola’s poem ‘Poetry Set to Music’, now set to music! Submissions for morphrog 28 (January 2024) are now open. Send no more than six poems, accompanied by a bio note and headshot, to morphrog@gmail.com

Posted on

Deadline looms for the 37th Frogmore Poetry Prize

The deadline for entries to this year’s Prize (31 May) is fast approaching. Adjudicator Helena Nelson, poet, critic, publisher and founding editor of the renowned HappenStance press, will read all submissions. Full details at: www.frogmorepress.co.uk/frogmore-poetry-prize

Helena Nelson

The Prize was established in 1987 with a generous endowment from André Evans in his capacity as President of the Frogmore Foundation. John Rice, then Director of the New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone (and also a widely published poet in his own right) was persuaded to adjudicate, conditions of entry were drafted, and we were ready to roll. There may or may not have been a good reason for the decision to award the prize money in guineas rather than pounds sterling. This may or may not have been because 25 guineas sounded more desirable as booty than 25 pounds. Whatever the grounds, once the principle was established, it became a defining feature of the Prize, though the booty has multiplied tenfold over its thirty-seven years and now stands at a more impressive 250 guineas. Not that it has ever been about anything quite as vulgar as cash, albeit cash paid in guineas. Kudos, we hoped, would be the lure, and so it ultimately proved, with increasing numbers of submissions from poets whose names were recognised and whose work encountered in publications of note (though reputation counts for little when entries are judged anonymously, as they have been since the Prize’s inauguration).

David Satherley won that first Prize back in 1987, and Laura Jenner won last year. Between them there have been a series of notable winners, with John Latham and Howard Wright both winning twice, Caroline Price three times and Emily Wills on an astonishing four occasion! In every case, the Prize was awarded by a different adjudicator on each occasion, surely testament to the skill and craft of these poets. A selection of poems shortlisted for the Prize was published in The Frogmore Poetry Prize Anthology 1987–1991 and also in Decade: Ten Years of the Frogmore Poetry Prize. The 40th anniversary of the Prize in 2026 may prove to be the moment to bring its forty deserving winners together in one volume.

Posted on

Adjudicator for Frogmore Prize 2023 announced

The 37th Frogmore Poetry Prize (2023) will be adjudicated by poet, critic, publisher and founder of HappenStance Press Helena Nelson. Helena’s latest collection, Pearls: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (2022) is reviewed in the latest edition (number 100) of The Frogmore Papers. She is also the author of the acclaimed How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published (HappenStance, 2016), a book that collects the insights and useful ideas she has gathered over her many years in poetry publishing.

Helena Nelson. (Photo: Gerry Cambridge)

The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2023. Full details at:  http://www.frogmorepress.co.uk/frogmore-poetry-prize

This year’s Prize (2022), adjudicated by John Freeman, was won by Laura Jenner from County Antrim for her poem ‘Smoothing’. Runners-up were Elizabeth Best (Louisville, Kentucky) and John Lancaster (Totnes, Devon).

Posted on

morphrog’s 25th number lands

morphrog 25, celebrating, as ever, ‘poetry in the extreme’, is now live at http://www.morphrog.com. This latest edition of Frogmore’s online journal includes work from Ella Walsworth-Bell, Ian Heffernan, Mark McDonnell, Heather Sager, Gordon Scapens, Ian C Smith and Rodney Wood and also features a gallery of photographs by the late Martin Kay, whose work has graced many previous editions.

morphrog now welcomes submissions of translations, short prose/flash fiction, photographs and other visual images and audio content, as well as poetry ‘in the extreme’ or otherwise. Visit www.morphrog.com for submission guidelines.

Posted on

Free launch event for Echoes from the Old Hill, 1 June 2022, Lewes

The Frogmore Press has published a companion volume to its 2012 anthology, Poems from the Old Hill.  Echoes from the Old Hill, edited by Jeremy Page, brings together the work of eighteen widely-published poets resident in Lewes and will be launched at the Elephant & Castle, White Hill, Lewes, on Wednesday 1 June, 7.00 – 8.30pm (doors 6.45). All welcome, free admission. A number of contributors to the anthology will read.

Copies of Echoes from the Old Hill will be available at the launch (£10.00, cash or cheque only please), or can be purchased from Skylark in the Needlemakers or post free from The Frogmore Press at 21 Mildmay Road, Lewes BN7 1PJ (cheques payable to ‘The Frogmore Press’).

Contributors to the anthology are: John Agard, Colin Bell, Patrick Bond, Molly Chasseaud, Caroline Clark, James Flynn, Charlotte Gann, Martin Gayford, Neil Gower, Grace Nichols, Jeremy Page, Rachel Playforth, Ann Segrave, Catherine Smith, Peter Stewart, Janet Sutherland, Chris Sykes and Marek Urbanowicz.