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)

 

 DECEMBER POET OF THE MONTH: 
CLARE E. POTTER (WALES)

                                                                                                                           

Clare E. Potter (c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

Clare E. Potter is a bilingual poet and radio presenter who studied an MA in Mississippi and taught in New Orleans for a decade. Her BBC Radio Wales program The Poets' Poet was nominated for a 2025 Celtic Media Award. She is a trainee poetry therapy practitioner who facilitates creative projects with community groups, and is driven by the belief that poetry can be a force for personal and social change. She mentors other artists and writers, gave a TedX talk and won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. Other awards include two Literature Wales writing bursaries and Arts Council Funding for a poetry/jazz collaboration to respond to the trauma of Hurricane Katrina. She’s translated for National Poet of Wales, and was a Hay Festival Writer at Work.

Clare has had various writing residencies including the Landmark Trust, Moravian Academy, Wales Arts Review and has collaborated with artists to create poetry installations in hospitals, on pavements and parks. She directed a BBC documentary, The Wall and the Mirror, about her village barber which encouraged community action to save the local miner’s institute. Her two recent poetry books are Healing the Pack supported with a grant from the Society of Authors and Welsh language pamphlet Nôl Iaith. Earlier this year, she was an ambassador for the Welsh language at Llif a European languages retreat with focus on ecology, climate emergency and culture. Clare is this year’s Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Poetry Award winner for Wales and was recently appointed as Artist in Service for Rhondda Cynon Taf.

 

Two recent books available here: https://www.ystamp.cymru/cyhoeddiadau/p/rhagarcheb-nl-iaith-clare-e-potter

https://www.vervepoetrybookshop.com/product-page/healing-the-pack-clare-e-potter

 

Mechanics

 

Boy has a wire. He bends it when homeworking, listening,

makes shapes of his thinking.

Boy uses it to pick locks, to get into the gubbins of something—

a toy car, an old calculator; the wire does his bidding,

it’s the thread of his questions:

 

         How does this work? How do I take that apart, figure out

         what goes where and what makes what do what?

 

The wire is his key, the tool, the instrument of exploring,

a finger inviting him

to not take things as things are given to him.

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

First Response

After Robert Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’

 

Even the nights when the house was sleeping

my father got up to his alerter shrieking—

sleptwalked into his clothes laid out like a given-up ghost,

then with hands frozen from scraping windshield ice

he entered blazing houses, put other people’s fires out.

 

I’d wake too and stay awake fretting till the car, two streets away,

the lullaby of smoke creeping under my door

and his sigh as he’d sink back to bed and me into sleep—

no more fear about the ‘shout’ he wouldn’t talk about in the morning,

 

not as if I’d ask or cared what rages he had to calm,

bodies he had to carry, only Daddy, paint with me!

What did I know as I walked on his back the next day and scratched

at the embers in his hair, of what it took when tired-out

for him to paint me a butterfly in colours so warm, they still glow.

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

‘The Land Explores Us’

After ‘Terra Incognita,’ Helen Dunmore

 

In its way, the rock you sit on

is sussing you out

making the measure of you.

 

There’s a weight to your body

and then there’s a weight to your soul

this boulder—on the hill top

where you’ve nearly collapsed

after your heroic hike—knows

what you do not, has seen

it all before and stores up

each encounter, keeping tabs

for centuries, some break loose

as sheep rub hinds on edges.

 

You think you are marking upward trajectory

reaching this point,

surveying the cwm below, like a god

but the stone you don’t even speak to,

the belched-up promise, is patient,

knows that at any moment now

this ground may rumble, uproot this rock

sling you into the unknown.

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

Heart Song

untether from vessel and valve, lift from bone-cage,

leave your heart on a beach to exsiccate, pulse laid down like grooves of a

vinyl record, air to the chambers, a music of the sea’s tide,

harmony and melody,          the depths

not here Aum but

Cymric Cynghanedd, Celtic flute: your own organ

played not by dictate or rote but by shared vibration,

moon call. Oh look now, in to sound—this heart’s a planet, too,

once held in the astrology of your ribs, star charts

you couldn’t quite read. But soon,

 

when that wind from wave, when that breeze

from far away finds its mouth

on the ventricles of what once kept you alive, listen

to the song, to the song of the world soul

that you sometimes feel in your chest, and like now,

a heart urchin’s test on your palm; sea psalm

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

After ‘Bread and Wine’

 for Chris Torrance

If there was chaos in the mind, ever,

there was order in the garden, specifics

of leeks, chard, sprouting broccoli, feverfew

(you’d dry in the rafters) shards of crockery—heaped

treasure on the wall, a dropped offering to enter

Peace Lawn; a grasshopper leap over runnels

edging veg patches, towards the humming pole

to wait

for head-height goshawk, insatiable ewes,

even your kitchen toad as muse, all the creatures who’d

make it over your man-made gate, down your chimney

and up the sink’s plug hole, then you’d turn them over,

mulch them into the topsoil of your many inks.

 

The fumes of petrol mower; that poison once

in a July from that blue flower; still the pain and the noticing;

clouds partings; alchemy’s temperatures. In the barn

next to your boarded-up house, the owl still lullabying.

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

You Don’t Make it to the Middle Aisle Tonight

 

In Aldi, you burst into tears over the broccoli

when you see the young mother pushing

the trolley, her boy in his hedgehog jumper

and wonky glasses saying, Mammy,

these oranges look luverly. It’s the way

 

she stops bowing over grapes and raspberries

face-to-faces his delight for citric planet

in a galactic net. For her, there’s no shop now

no rush here, meal to cook later, no you watching her,

just her boy’s delight in something about

those oranges, and she enters it.

 

You’re on your own, trolley overflowing

as you’re lobbing all the usuals to feed

your own boy, six feet nearly, and he’s

down the valley in the city stadium, throwing

discus into the future, coming down after

his own velocity, his corkscrewing foot

slowing him so he can measure his distance,

and you holding a bag of apples remember

him, legs dangling in the trolley, how he took it all in;

 

for all the mistakes you might have made

you know, you, like this mother, had entered

fully, all the times you could, his wonder of cauliflower,

strawberry, the conveyor belt, its disappearing to where?

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter

After the Red Wheelbarrow

 

I heaped so much

into you

 

ideas of simplicity, old

American cars

 

the open road, and lately,

my dad’s allotment

 

I’d wheeled you and settled you down

in my writer’s shed

 

dragged you out to show others

the wheel makes light work

 

I’d forgotten the nuts and bolts,

the necessary muck.

(c) 2025 Clare E. Potter