Finished Creatures is one year old

The biannual literary journal Finished Creatures has just celebrated its third issue with almost 70 pages of poetry on the theme of Balance.

Its luxurious crisp, white pages hold poems by Jill Abram, Isabelle Baafi, Claire Booker, Rachel Bower, Claire Collison, Martin Crucefix, Claire Dyer, Josh Ekroy, Susannah Hart, Hilaire, Matt Howard, Jenny Mitchell, Jessica Mookherjee, Matt Riches and Penelope Shuttle among a host of other poets.

It’s the brainchild of editor, Jan Heritage. And as so often is the case, she’s a gifted poet herself:

Finished Creatures is a new platform for emerging and experienced poets: an independent, no profit, printed magazine, carefully produced with an eye for detail and originality.

Here you will find poets engaging with the realities of the Anthropocene. You’ll find work that considers human and non-human beings with equal interest and affinity, and which sometimes explores the territory in between.  

Alongside environmental concerns and ecopoetry are poems that draw on personal experience, politics, myth and science to express something new and restless.

The theme of Balance was chosen before the virus took hold. But there are poems here that seem to foretell: chaos and apocalypse feature, as do gods – of mischief or of no use. Time takes on new meaning. Things disappear from view, perspectives change. But there is also the celebration of small triumphs, the ordinary and the near at hand.

The next issue is being guest-edited by Corrupted Poetry – a collective comprising Nic Stringer, Fiona Larkin and also Michelle Penn, whose poem, portrait of you as time, is featured on the inside cover of the Balance issue.

If you’d like to submit your work, you have until July 31st to send up to four of your unpublished poems on the theme of Stranger.

Copies of the magazine cost £7.00 +1.50 p&p. ORDER DIRECT FROM THE PUBLISHER: poetry@finishedcreatures.co.uk    Or via: http://www.paypal.me/creaturespoetrymag

For more information, or to buy a copy of any of the first three issues: Airbourne, Risk or Balance, please follow this link: Finished Creatures

Boris Johnson fights the Jabberwocky

Thank you Andy Croft, editor of the 21st Century Poetry slot at the Morning Star, for taking my Lewis Carroll pastiche Jab-or-Washy? If Boris has time to read it when he returns to work tomorrow, he may see himself in a new light.

The poem came about in time-honoured fashion, through a small group of friends setting themselves a writing challenge. My brother laid down the gauntlet with a poem about Covid-19 composed in the style of Robert Burns. Duncan Fraser responded with a deliciously irreverent take on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline entitled Fear No More th’infected Bun. Then I shamelessly plundered Lewis Carroll’s great absurdist work for a chance to criticise how this pandemic has been handled. It was a record 7 days from writing the poem to publication. Normally it takes me months, years or, more frequently, never!

I couldn’t have known that casting Boris Johnson as the tardy battler against the Jabberwocky, would have me dicing with death – literally.

When I submitted my poem, he was doing well at home, with very mild symptoms. By the time Jab-or-Washy? went up on-line at the Morning Star, he had been admitted to hospital. During the following three days, it looked increasingly as if my poem was about to cross the boundaries of extremely bad taste.

Luckily for Boris, he pulled through and is thankfully on the mend. Let’s hope his close shave with mortality will give him the necessary jolt to properly resource the NHS. Praise and appreciation of course is great. But money is pretty handy too!

You can read Jab-or-washy? by clicking on the following link: Jab-or-washy? by Claire Booker

The Morning Star’s Culture pages carry several poems a week, together with book and arts reviews and literary discussion pieces. You can read seven free articles per month, before being required to subscribe. To submit a poem, email it to Andy Croft at info@smokestack-books.co.uk