Poet of the Month

January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

2025: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
January: Annest Gwilym (Wales)
February: Sam Smith (Wales)
March: Dave Lewis (Wales)
April: Scott Elder (France)
May: Angela Kosta (Italy)
June: Abeer Ameer (Wales)
July: Jenny Mitchell (England)
August: Sydney Lea (USA)
September: Richard Collins (USA)
October: Mark Lewis (Wales)
November: Robert Nisbet (Wales)
Clare E. Potter (Wales)

2026: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
Rhoda Thomas (Wales)
Mike Everley (Wales)
Regina Resta (Italy)
Anna Lewis (England)
Carmella de Keyser (England)
 Mujë Buçpapaj (Albania)
Luis Benitez (Argentina)

 

 

                                                      AUGUST POET OF THE MONTH:
                                                    David Annwn





                        David Annwn (c) 2026 Lesley Newland

 

 

David Annwn is an Anglo-Welsh poet, film-critic, eco-campaigner
and acclaimed expert in the Parisian phantasmagoria, 

whose most recent books are Shared Origins (The Seventh Quarry) 

(with David Lloyd and Mike Jenkins), Aetherstrophen, (zimzalla),

translations of and responses to  Emmy Henning's poetry with
John Goodby and Giraldus Redidivus, (Incunabula)

a sumptuous and ground-breaking, avant-garde
psycho-geography of Gerald of Wales Cambrian topography.

 

Stephen Simpson’s paintings of The Last Supper,

St George’s Crypt for the homeless, Leeds

 

I was walking in Leeds
and they took me over the threshold

to the chapel in the crypt
where they looked after hundreds of
thousands

during the war and so many more
in the war that life is for so many.

Where Steve’s paintings appear on the
bare stone walls
fragments jagged like icon survivors

of the catacombs 

 

yet modern, contemporaneous. torn

pictures of people moving amongst us,

 

how few facets we see sometimes

of the living

of each other

Jesus Christ smiling slightly holding
the cup
and his followers with faces formed
from the archive of pictures:

the restless ones, the recently
addicted, the recovering,
those with hooded eyes and risky
grins

Ones turned from themselves in
estrangement and pity and fear

cross-hatched in yellow light,
contoured inside a nimbus

Steve you embody them so ---
here - in livid flashes of being

flickering and one with closed eyes
in prayer’s head-space or a trance of

discovery or trauma, smashed mirrors
and the calmer ones as if
the fragments of a wider humanity;

you have hammered at the door
of split images in the modern
postmodern

and found them here in the shadow of
the city, and lifted them up

to star this firmament of exposed
strata in the caring hands

you have carried us over the threshold

(c) 2026 David Annwn

In Oxymonronia

 

How fast the unicorns fall

the lions put up their dukes

(this is Transatlantic for

a soft toy collection)

How has Paddington

at the Queen’s purse

become Randy Pandy

and Rag,Tag and Trompe l’oeil

become a famous photograph

how can the artist formerly

known as still be? How

can sweat not be the sweat of

sweatshop masseuses

swapped and bartered

by billionaire Bobcats

and the Teddy not be

President but a travesty

groundhog Nazi?

How will these things

come to be, stay tuned

to see the fake fur fly.

(c) 2026 David Annwn

 

 

Collage

 

Through limits and concentrics, I have travelled –

I have sent these out like homing birds and I have

clipped the ecliptic,

 

There are many rivers to cross says the old song

I have co-inhabited space my orbits through big air

franked and stamped

with North West Yorkshire

the devices of multi-nationals

screwing their workers

have passed over the

work of my hands

 

Here the Medieval maker

in red atmosphere is umbilically

à la Sistine sestina to Bowie

My eye is populous, voracious,

seraphic seeing this in the everyday

abandoned that nothing be lost

and I’ll set my discoveries

down at the crossings of space and time,

and I’ll sign it: face to face

 

 

(for Steve Simpson’s postcard collage)

 

(c) 2026 David Annwn

 

 

                                                                                    Emanation  ‘26

 

She is the spirit of television

 

in body grey sheathe she sings
from the other side of ether
the isle is full of noises

 

she was the single of the world she sang
‘A mighty maze of mystic
magic rays’
and dark the wing her décolletage
and forest of Ariels uprising

 

men on cameras pushed forward
like daleks
signalling the planisphere

 

we see ourselves through screens
our selves

 

chimeras on
apparition window

 

biomorph to holomorph
recurring studio through studio
into rooms of different ages;

 

it reaches out
through decades cadences

 

the tech dream ketamine
Hal-luci   [fer]  - nation

 

rearranging photons
shuttling consonants:

 

Violet sine
Invite lose
soviet lien

 

she sings the static sea
she sings frequency

 

she sings us television

(c) 2026 David Annwn


Blink

 

The stick insect in its paragraph

 

Spectra, insetto stecco

Phasmatoptera, bugsticks,

walkingsticks, ghost

insects, Clitarchus hookeri,

pryfyn ffon, Devil’s darning

needles, insecto palo, God

Horses, bicho-pau, stafur skordýr

wandelende tak, Phryganistria, 

Ctenomorpha, Phobaeticus, leaf insects,

stick bugs, Phasmatodeans, leaf-bugs,

Acanthoxyla geisovii,

walking leaves, Phasmids,

חרק מקל Acanthoxyla inermis

대벌레, Φάσμα, ᛋᛏᛁᚲᚴ ᛁᚾᛋᛖᚲᛏ

Stabheuschrecke, Phasme,

छड़ी कीट, Phylliidae

ナナフシ

  

remaining absolutely stationary

(c) 2026 David Annwn

 

 

Disembodied 

 

The maniraptoran theropod sings from the tree
It sings an evolution:  an act of stone beyond memory:

scales  cells, feathers,

bombs fall on Beirut, an American F-15
brought down near Kuwait

The adventurers are at it again
deaths are just ‘the way it is’ -

The security expert on the TV almost lovingly
describes the anatomy

of ballistic missiles;
The complete nonchalance

with which lives are annulled -
at a distance
an administration: the children scream

 
The tumble cycle of the washer roars, almost finished
the steam cleaner in Mint Velvet
suspends a question of smoke

 

the clothes hanging in rows sing silence 

suddenly disembodied

 

facets in the jewellery shop

echo no reflection

 

the city is genetic etymology 

the goldfinch sings from the fossil-tree

(c) 2026 David Annwn


Turinosphere

 

there are veined balustrades
of marble and steps suggesting 
a bathing pool
which open instead
on a starburst altar
with figures treading air

 

how high they go these swimmers
of the empyrean
in chapels where the cosmos
is turning is always
turning itself inside out
and simultaneously still
trying to decipher
the swirls on its shell.

(c) 2026  David Annwn

 

 

Ludlow Locus

 

“Who do you think those people were?

Those were not just some ordinary people”

Said Pollack as Victor Ziegler.

And so in Ludlow, in gloaming, now;

 

‘Within the navil of this hideous Wood, 
Immur'd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels’

‘What day/night will be the wildest’

‘this isle the greatest of all the main’

 

Comus and mollusc; and Kubrick

had it right in Eyes Wide Shut

Mommy keep your girls away

from Epstein and Weinstein

 

It doesn’t stop there. ‘If every just man

Had but a moderate and beseeming share

Of that which lewdly-pampered luxury

Now heaps upon some few with vast excess – ‘

 

Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough,

Milton’s poem-play almost forgotten

but fake Comus-Elvis sings on,

under the Butter Cross:

crooning of sleeping pills

ketamine and Hecate.

 

 

(Quotations from John Milton’s Comus, performed in Ludlow, 1634)

 

(c) 2026  David Annwn

 

 

All poems David Annwn (c) 2026