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 POET OF THE MONTH: 
ROBERT NISBET (WALES)

                                                                                                                            Robert Nisbet (c) 2025 Phillip Clarke

Robert Nisbet is from Pembrokeshire, a graduate of Swansea and Essex, and is a short–story writer, poet and creative writing tutor. Robert taught English for 30 years in grammar and comprehensive schools and for over a decade was an associate lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen, where he also worked for a while as an adjunct professor for the Central College of Iowa. He was writer in residence, Llangatwg School, Neath, in 1999.

For 30 years he was an active short story writer, being published mainly in Wales, with his collections including Sounds of the Town (Alun Books, 1982), which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, and a New and Selected Stories, Downtrain (Parthian, 2004). 

He then switched to poetry, and has been widely published in Britain, in magazines like Poetry Wales, The North and The Frogmore Papers, and then in the USA, where he has four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and once for Best of the Net.

Two short pamphlet collections, Merlin’s Lane (2011) and Robeson. Fitzgerald and Other Heroes (2017), were published by Prolebooks, the latter winning the Prole Pamphlet Prize for that year. His newest collection, In a Small County, has just appeared from The Seventh Quarry Press.  Available from the Shop at www.seventhquarrypress.com

Rough Sketch

The sort of day I’m thinking of,
there’d be no prizes, necessarily,
nor pensions, perks, celebrity,
finance nor general purposes. There’d be
a little sunshine, maybe just
a very, very late winter’s edge
in the air, in that place
which runs the length of St. Bride’s Bay
(coves, gannets, sea crash) on to
Cardigan, lands and fields where there are
streams. I know I’d like a stream in this,
the smells of gorse, seaweed,
grass would do, and then to walk,
the hedgerows now so copious,
green as they will be through May
and June. Importantly, a row of cottages,
there as they were a century ago,
a meadow running down to
the road, a sheepdog’s crisp
bright yelp. Then, out on the sudden
orange beach, a teeming around of kites,
surfers and flying sails.

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet

Dormitories

We read of them as boys, the Bunters, the Etonians,
the midnight feasts. We never really envied them.

Later there were many other bastions.
Wet socks slapped to the changing room floor,
the Clarbie Seconds’ football team, hot tubs
for dousing mud, then down to the Picton Inn.
A couple of grammar school masters’ staff rooms,
where the crustacean elderly and those, like me,
crabby before their time, sat be-gowned.   

In a university hall at Clyne, I roomed with Dai,
and come eleven, twelve, my metaphysical poets
and Dai’s mech. eng. were packed off for the evening.
We got to our beds, last smoke, and the slow review
of days that played out the rhythms of a tango,
others measured like a professorial fugue.
We surveyed girls and pubs and gamesmanship.
Dai brought off-colour jokes from the Welsh Society,
then he was suddenly asleep. I lingered, wakeful,
for a while, as Clyne Castle, on a hill above a bay,
would strew night’s rain or a silvered moonlight
around my wondering head.

At ten and seven years old, I and my brother lay
in our bedroom in the well-named Merlin’s Crest.
I told each night a meandering fable (based,
I now suspect, on The Beano and Lord Snooty’s Pals)
of boys and games and trips and motorbikes.
A yarn, a thread, which ran for years.
A tale of mornings and the crests of hills.

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet

Paul Robeson at the County Theatre
Haverfordwest, May 1^st, 1938

They’ve known for years the simplest evenings out,
church socials, shilling dances and the flicks.
Hepburn and Boyer playing Break of Hearts,
and Garbo as Karenina, Will Hay
in some daft farce, Temple in Stowaway,
Astaire and Rogers dancing through Top Hat.

And now celebrity. His name rings sounds
of fame and wonder and exotica
and all that sings of marvels up the line.
A mile from town, doorways in Prendergast
flutter with waves and welcomes at the sense
that here, in flesh and voice, entering town,
we have a burnished legend. Down in town,
crowds mill, the man is warm, signs autographs.
They love him, they applaud.

                                                The concert starts:
a famed soprano singing Handel airs
a Milford schoolboy playing violin.
And then the sad lament of Shenandoah
and Go Down, Moses. Robeson’s rumbling voice
cossets and captivates, until the night,
pregnant with novelty, swells up in love,
to clasp and clap and touch their gentle guest.
Then Ol’ Man River is his final gift.

They’ll thrill, for years, to Robeson’s plunging bass,
sounding the sad deep river of his race.

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet

A Sudden Summer Sun on St. Bride’s Bay

Towels and Colas gritted by the sand,
more brown than golden sand on a day when
a warm bluster of westerly wind
is the beach’s feature.

She is just shy, gauche really, seventeen.
She just does not want
to walk down the beach on such spindle shanks,
such sad bare legs exposed.

She huddles behind the windbreak until
the Mediterranean moment
when the sun rushes out, just as she peels her way
through the spider-written letter
from the boy from France.  

(What do we know of him? Seventeen also.
Not gauche but not adroit.
Loves languages and music and,
in the grace of a reserved adolescence,
loves the girl to the point of adoration.)

She reads his civilities, pleased, and then the phrase,
If I cannot become to see you this August,
my summer, he will be ruined

and she flowers, and walks,
on nicely-rounded spindle legs,
to the water, in the sun,
feeling herself a mademoiselle,
a mannequin, a belle.

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet

Grocers
Gwyn and Mair, closing their business after 37 years

If anyone ever does a play, he thought,
the story of the grocery shops, we’ll hear
the quiet hum of the bacon slicer,
turning to a hissing as it hits the meat,
we’ll catch the smell of cheese and bacon.
And soap. The solid yellow bars of soap.

I loved the smell of newsprint, Gwyn, but oh,
I loathed those mags, those girlie magazines.

And ah, the customers, the thick, the thin,
the grinning, the gregarious, the repetitive,
the slow, the sardonic and the downright mean.

And Gwyn, you’d open a packet of Woodbine fags
and sell them singly to the kids.      Well …

Our assistants, all of them, Dai Upper Lip,
and Tim from the cottages, the paper boy.
And beefy Jane, here in the snow of ‘82,
who dug out a sled, great truck of a thing,
and took the deliveries round on foot.

And Gwyn, when the Johnsons’ child was ill
and needed that operation, we took the donations.
We were the hub, that time. We were the village hub.

Too right, girl. Village mornings, Mair,
and village nights, the customers came through
to talk and deal. We were the bloody hub. 

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet

The Poet’s Writing Shed
The Boathouse, Laugharne

Searching for past and art, we climb
from the estuary, the herons, the gulls,
up the path to the poet’s Boathouse
and, roost-high on cliff, his writing shed.

The window looks in upon a capsule
of a post-war, cold-times, radio world,
the lamp, the bottles, pens,
the jacket over the chair,
and our eyes come to rest upon
what surely is his craft’s real cornerstone,
the raft of crumpled sheets, strewn paper,
faint, faded hieroglyphs.

We feel this quiet place, its heart beyond
the snatch of empires and economies,
a world whose rules are of paper and pen,
in which wealth shall have no dominion.

(c) 2025 Robert Nisbet