Getting your poetry published is a tricky business. Hundreds of years ago it was easy. You just needed to be posh, get sent down from Oxford, wear a frilly shirt, party your way around Europe and Lord Byron was your uncle. Byron was brilliant btw. Now it’s different. Well, actually it isn’t, but at least us ordinaries do have an outside chance.

History

Since the war British poets have had a slowly increasing choice of outlets. …

What a strange question! OK, maybe not. For what it’s worth, here’s what I think…

I often wonder what constitutes ‘good’ these days. Especially when you read some of the absolute drivel that is passed off as poetry by (mostly) young girls who put the word poet (in brackets) after their names on social media and use words like creative and passionate a lot, without really knowing what either means — argh! Ah well, so much for puberty.

OK, I was lucky. Spoilt you might say. I had no-one to ask so I taught myself. I learnt what was considered…

If you search the Internet you can find lots of ‘Best Books Ever’ or ‘Top 100 Books To Read Before You Die’ lists. The BBC did a pretty decent ‘Big Read’ list back in 2000 as well. It got me thinking that these lists are not for everyone, as maybe you just like crime thrillers, a bit of poetry, or some sci-fi etc.

Also, I think I’ve only read about a quarter of the suggested books on these ‘must read‘ lists, which sometimes makes me feel a little bit of a philistine. Then I got to thinking about the sort…

The sun is shining, Covid-19 is thankfully receding and the pubs will be open again in a couple of weeks! But, alas, the Welsh (and British) media is still churning out negativity...

Welsh Media Crisis

When I was growing up we had a few daily newspapers and one or two TV channels. That’s where we got our official news. Establishment bias yes, small ‘c’ conservative maybe but at least we had the pub. We had our work place, our neighbours, school and the street. We took what ‘they’ told us with a pinch of salt, realised ‘they’ were out of touch and rarely…

The Poetry Book Awards is an annual, international book award given to the best poetry books produced by indie writers, self published authors or books published by independent or small presses.

Even though more and more people are enjoying and participating in creative writing it is becoming increasingly difficult to become traditionally published, especially in the poetry world. Most of the top book prizes and competitions do not allow self published authors to enter. If they are allowed then many are extremely expensive leaving independent publishers, self publishers and indie authors struggling to find the recognition they deserve. …

Welsh writer, poet and photographer, Dave Lewis, has just published his twentieth book, a new poetry collection — ‘Scratching The Surface‘.

“An epic collage of nature, history, adventure and grief that leaps off the page and thumps you in the chest. From Celtic mythology, to the African bush and ‘The Matrix’, through the lives of Ho Chi Minh, Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, an abused porn star, a transgender cousin, to ex-lovers and close family this collection ebbs and flows as mesmerically as a river on its journey to the sea. A fluid and heartfelt abstraction that speaks loudly to the passion…

Welsh writer and poet Dave Lewis has just completed a week-long cycle across the north of England. He covered 275 miles, completed two iconic cycling trails: Hadrian’s Cycleway and the Sea to Sea / Coast to Coast (C2C) and has just published a book of his adventures.

In the past Dave has cycled the famous Land’s End to John o’ Groats challenge (back in 2005) and also created a circuit of Wales, after which he set up ‘Wales Trails’ in 2016.

‘Dave’s third cycling adventure is another little gem for fans of amateur cycling memoirs. Following on from the success…

Who’s watched ‘Killing Eve’? You know, that TV programme about British military intelligence being run by women. Posh, public school women, Asian women and pregnant black women. At best a comedy script (although in reality just plain sexist) that tries to subtly slip in a ‘men are crap and useless joke’ every episode. Then they waltz about Europe whilst they laugh at and continue to make pathetic jokes about how shit men are at everything. They live in a fantasy world where armed police are so crap that they fail to clear a building properly, where office workers are suddenly…