Dawn Gorman believes poetry should be everywhere - puts it on beermats, uses it to
work with people with memory loss, facilitates writing workshops, organises poetry
events and runs international poetry competitions. She is widely published, and has
performed in New York, Paris, London - and lots of smaller places in between.

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that.” Mary Oliver

Martin Malone

Guest Poet: Martin Malone

Martin Malone lives in north-east Scotland. He has published two poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011) and Cur (Shoestring, 2015). His Great War-related third collection, The Unreturning is forthcoming. An Associate Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Aberdeen University, he recently completed a PhD in poetry at Sheffield University and contributes two chapters to the upcoming Mars and Minerva: The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War - Volume 1: Australasia, the British Isles, and the United States.

9th November 2018, The Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 1LN

It was lovely to see both familiar and new faces at our 'extra' Words & Ears on Friday, and, in spite of our theme being the First World War, it was, on balance, a truly uplifting evening, where the over-riding impression was one of the tenacity of the human spirit in challenging times. Martin Malone treated us to a 'golden summer' first-half set of non-war poems, leading up to readings from his WWI pamphlet 'Mr Willett's Summertime', and from his forthcoming WWI collection, 'The Unreturning'. Lots to provoke the thoughts, not simply about war, that war, but about our own vulnerability, and that of everything around us: "...we've time to die / over and over before our letters reach home". Thank you Martin, and also to our open mic readers for sharing their work, including John Hawkhead for his poem about the Afghanistan war ("Here too, poppies fall, seeds scattered on stone"), Richard Carder, who shared poems by Ivor Gurney, Mark Sayers, Ann Phillips, Chaucer Cameron, Tessa Strickland, Nicola Heaney, Lizzie Parker, with more seeds, and a welcome sense of unstoppable optimism, Hannah M Teasdale, and Helen Sheppard, with her wonderful and necessary poem about birth.