morphrog’s 33rd edition is now live at www.morphrog.com.
Poets from Australia, Canada, India, the UK and the USA are represented in this bumper international edition, published in morphrog’s 17th year. Among the many familiar contributors to the magazine, 33 also includes new work by Charlotte Dormandy, Michael Igoe, William Kilgore, Megan Wildhood and other writers whose poems appear here for the first time.
The Frogmore Poetry Prize for 2026 has been awarded to Laura Jenner from Co Antrim, who joins a distinguished list of poets who have carried off the Prize more than once – Caroline Price (1988, 1990, 1993), John Latham (1991, 1992), Howard Wright (2004, 2009), Sharon Black (2011, 2025) and Emily Wills (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018).
Adjudicator Mike Barlow says of her winning poem ‘Pat Butcher’: ‘with its filmic description and evocation of character, this was a poem I immediately knew I’d need to read again. And the more I did so and researched the epigraph and the character herself, the more rewarding it became. In a clever conflation of Boudica and the eponymous character from EastEnders, precise imagery and natural rhythms yield an affectionate portrayal of a flawed character who might ‘hound and chivvy out the flabby troops of Rome’.’ First runner-up for the Prize was Ciarán Parkes from Galway and second runner-up was John Lancaster from Totnes.
Laura Jenner
PAT BUTCHER
‘In stature she was very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; with a great mass of the tawniest hair; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.’ – Cassius Dio
No one smokes a Berkeley like Patricia Butcher –
dropped deftly on the lower lip, the flick
of a hefty gold lighter, eyes cast down,
a sweet inhale, then a sharp glance sideways,
ready for anything, for the Roman Empire,
in her favoured fuchsia pinks and cornflower blues.
Pat, the fallen woman who got up, the battered wife
and tart and cow and slapper, has gathered close her troops,
pours herself a stiff one, slicks on her warpaint,
strides into the breach for the battle of her life.
Commission then her portrait, in which she stands,
bestriding seven counties with a double gin in hand.
Pat Butcher, who has more earrings in her life
than Shakespeare had sonnets, and each, like them,
a small crystalline hymn to tone and mood,
has no regrets, no good name, and nothing left to lose.
I would like to think that all small proud nations
in their hour of need, could summon up their inner Pat,
much fiercer than a wolf, more faithful than a dog,
and hound and chivvy out the flabby troops of Rome,
fight them on the beaches, off the edge of Southend Pier.
Like all the loving dead, she reappears in dreams,
the woman much missed, in the visions of the dying,
emerging through the steam clearing Platform Ten
at King’s Cross Station – ‘Pat? Pat Butcher?
Is that you?’ And Pat smiles back, the long cigarette
eternally poised between two raised fingers,
like she’s never been away, as though death itself
or the past twenty centuries were the dream,
and this is the only truth, and the lighter flicks again.
The Frogmore Papers’ 107th edition has been published and will be finding its way through the letterboxes of subscribers and contributors in the very near future. The issue has a striking cover by Armenian artist Arusyak Pivazyan, inspired by Peter Carpenter’s poem ‘Under Stars’. Other poets featured include Mike Barlow, John Freeman and Linda Saunders, from Ireland Marguerite Doyle, Mary Howlett and Noel King, and from Canada Salvatore Difalco, Sarah Feldman and Danielle Hubbard. And 107 has prose from Wendy Brandmark, Jeanette Forbes and Jack Jenkins. The late John Lucas (1937 – 2025) is the featured poet in the ‘From the Archive’ section. Copies are available for £5.00 (post free) from The Frogmore Press, 21 Mildmay Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1PJ. Subscriptions remain competitively priced at £10.00 for one year (two issues), £15.00 for two years (four issues).
Peter Carpenter
UNDER STARS
Bar the occasional sweep of headlights at the crossroads
along the Farnham Road, there’s minimal light pollution
here on Church Common after ten at night where under
the night’s black sea, I’m out walking our pair of dogs
who sniff the air or tug on their leads towards hidden life
somewhere in the bracken, up by the tower of St John
the Baptist, set in rubble flint and limestone dressing,
before Hector cocks his leg and pees into a scumble
of fallen leaves. After the unprompted questioning
of why we’re here and where we’re going, a tracery
of words flickers across my brain – don’t run away
from the shadow, turn round, hunt it down – and it’s then
I crick my neck back against my shoulder blades
and stop to gaze at the empire above us, its ever-shifting
permutations of planets and constellations, distant meteor
showers, traced in the names of myths and legends –
Pegasus, Venus, Castor and Pollux, and there, Orion
the Hunter, his sword’s tip marked by a star we know
as Hatsya, visible now over Azerbaijan and Odesa,
still light years away from a family group heading across
disputed territory for a settlement on the West Bank.
morphrog’s 32nd edition is now live at www.morphrog.com It includes photography by Martin Kay, Bruach Kandinsky-Mhor and Peter Stewart, prose by Phil Powrie and poems from around the world by Craig Constantine, Neil Elder, Emily Hay, Jenny Hockey, Michael Igoe, Antony Johae, Anna Lewis, Joseph Long, Stephanie Ross, Gordon Scapens, Sanjeev Sethi and Ian C Smith.
morphrog 33 will be published in July and submissions of poetry, prose and photography are now invited for the summer edition. Please send work for consideration in a single document (Word if poetry or prose) to morphrog@gmail.com
The autumn issue of The Frogmore Papers has been published and dispatched. In addition to poetry from familiar names such as Vuyelwa Carlin, D A Prince and Myra Schneider, number 106 features new prose from Matthew Allen, Benjamin George Coles and Candyce Lange and all ten poems shortlisted for this year’s Frogmore Prize adjudicated by John Greening, including Sharon Black’s winning poem ‘Pont des Arts’ and poems by runners-up Michael Greavy and Jonathan Edwards.
This issue’s archive poem is by John Whitworth (1945 – 2019), whose ‘The Householder’s Tale’ was originally published in the Papers’ 65th edition in 2005. Copies of 106 are available post-free from The Frogmore Press for £5.00. Subscriptions remain £10.00 for one year, £15.00 for two.
Here is Sharon Black’s Frogmore Prize winning poem:
PONT DES ARTS
I miss the weight, the chink and slide
of steel through steel, the doting voices
I do – forever –
silence as a key rotates
a shank snaps open, a lock clicks shut
a tiny key’s tossed in the Seine.
Love is not beyond endurance.
Brass or steel, engraved or plastic-coated
I strained and warped under the bulky
chains of hearts and names –
barnacles on a hull. Doesn’t any union
hide an inch of metal grille
through which a river could once be spotted
bearing yachts and bâteaux-mouches
slipping eternally
under beams and ornate arches?
When they came with saws, with clippers,
I shivered as they jemmied off
one million cadences d’amour:
some ended up in municipal trucks,
others scattered like confetti, took
their stories to the riverbed,
to the flimsy keys and solid hope
that locked them.
The 40th Frogmore Prize will be adjudicated by the poet Mike Barlow.
Mike has won prizes in numerous competitions including first prize in the Amnesty International (2002), Ledbury (2005) and National (2006) Competitions. He is the author of four full collections, most recently A Land Between Borders (Templar), and seven pamphlets.
The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2026. Full details at: www.frogmorepress.co.uk/frogmore-poetry-prize/frogmore-poetry-prize-subguides/
This year’s Prize (2025), adjudicated by John Greening, was won by Sharon Black with her poem ‘Pont des Arts’. Runners-up were Michael Greavy and Jonathan Edwards.
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.
The 39th annual Frogmore Poetry Prize is heading south to Glasgow-born poet Sharon Black, who now lives in a remote valley of the Cévennes in France, where she runs writing retreats. Sharon was previously awarded the Frogmore Prize in 2011 by Tamar Yoseloff and thus joins a select group of poets who have won the Prize more than once – Caroline Price, John Latham, Howard Wright and Emily Wills.
Her most recent publications are The Last Woman Born on the Island (Vagabond Voices, 2022) and The Red House (Drunk Muse Press, 2022). Of her Prize-winning poem, ‘Pont des Arts’, adjudicator John Greening writes: ‘It handles all the resources of poetry with a sure hand. It is a monologue, although that’s not immediately obvious. The free-verse couplets allow for some imaginative bridging (how appropriate) from line to line, from stanza to stanza right through to the finely judged ending. Imagery is unshowy, consistently striking, and even what could be a cliché (confetti) becomes in the context ironically original. The poet is listening – from that very first ‘chink’ to the clatter of ‘ended up in municipal trucks’. The bridge’s voice is constantly varied too: direct speech, questions, a phrase in French. I particularly like the Larkinesque shift from description to meditation (‘Love is not beyond endurance’).’
First runner-up for the 2025 Prize is Michael Greavy, a Manchester-based teacher for his poem ‘Belgians’, which, John Greening notes, ‘stood out for its unexpected subject. The style is unusual too, a kind of stand-up Geoffrey Hill: densely packed lines, not unmusical but with a determinedly forward motion like a combine harvester. I thought it was terrific, and I liked the fact that some corners of the terrain are deliberately left inaccessible. Perhaps all poems should have verges where wild flowers can flourish.’
Second runner-up is Jonathan Edwards from Crosskeys, Gwent for his poem ‘’84’, which Greening notes ‘caught my attention from the start because of its unaffected plain style – harder than you might think. There were other poems more lyrical, more ambitious, but this tells its story deftly, economically with a sure sense of tone and a crucial understanding of line breaks. It’s also a quietly political poem, not easy to achieve without tub-thumping.’
Other poets shortlisted were Isabel Greenslade for ‘How swifts hold the sky’, Wendy Klein for ‘Soup of the Day’, Richard Lister for ‘Mystery wrapped in a puzzle’, Sue Moules for ‘Thomas Gainsborough Paints Mr & Mrs Andrews, 1750’, Yvonne Salmon for ‘Pilgrim Syntax (Seeking the Wells)’, Mark Totterdell for ‘Quinag’ and J S Watts for ‘Fen Shadow’.
All shortlisted poems will be published in the September edition of The Frogmore Papers. Copies available from The Frogmore Press at £5.00 inclusive of post and packing.
March sees the publication of the 105th issue of The Frogmore Papers. With a stunning cover by Brighton-born artist Lydia McDonnell, 105 is a truly international edition, with contributions from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, the UK and USA. Copies are available at £5.00 (post free) from: The Frogmore Press, 21 Mildmay Road, Lewes BN7 1PJ.
Looking ahead, number 106 will be published in September and will feature all the poems shortlisted for the 39th Frogmore Poetry Prize, adjudicated by the poet John Greening. John has published more than twenty collections of poetry, most recently From the East: Six Huntingdonshire Codices, which was published by Renard Press last year. He has previously been awarded the Alexandria International Poetry Prize, the Bridport Prize and the TLS Centenary Prize. The deadline for entries to the Frogmore Prize is 31 May and full details can be found at: www.frogmorepress.co.uk
The winner will receive the sum of 250 guineas (£262.50) and a two-year subscription to The Frogmore Papers.
Here is a taster from The Frogmore Papers 105:
morphrog’s 30th edition is now live at www.morphrog.com
This is another truly international edition, with poems and prose from nineteen writers based in or hailing from places as diverse as Canada, Germany, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, the UK and the USA, together with photographs by co-editor Peter Stewart. Submissions for morphrog 31 (July 2025) – poetry, prose, photographs, audio, whatever! – are invited at morphrog@gmail.com See the masthead of the current edition for submission guidelines.
From morphrog 30:
St Malo
Then I sailed to a tight-bunched town
pushing its fist out to sea, ramparts
razed by Allies’ planes, to a hotel
compressed like a book on a shelf —
tramped up shallow spiral stairs,
a drooping key in the lock of my door —
I walked in my sleep that night, a landing
cramped as a handkerchief, acid alive
in my guts. I swear I risked the well
of the stairs, stole into alleys
where light was scant, into a vestige
of war. Rationed vittles occupied
stalls, respectable women sent
road signs askew, inked bank notes
with Free France Now. Misdirected mail.
On a brothel doorstep, a newlaid turd.
I know I risked the stairwell —
I needed the soothe of waves,
lost myself down cobbled ravines,
aching for the sea.
© Jenny Hockey
