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POETRY
This Month's Poem
Jim-Jam-Julie
The Mountain Hare
One winter, as I walked out in the Trossachs,
as the bitter daylight paled and greyed
and a bald orange sun sank to the end
of its sky, in the gathering shadows of evening
I discovered her tracks on the leeward slope
of a snow-topped hill that called me upward
and into the couloir that lay beyond.
At the top I found her, the snow-white hare:
sleek and beautiful, wild and unreachable;
but for the muted drumming of my heart,
a breath-held stillness existed between us,
as, warily, she fixed me with untrusting eyes,
kept her distance enough to ensure
a clean escape if I moved too quickly.
I aimed my pen, but before I could capture her,
the curve of the sky, the rough edge of breeze,
in a snap she was gone, a ghost dissolved
into spindrift; always just out of my reach,
she moves around me still, flits between the faces
of the lonely city, melts into shadow
across a crowded street, finds hiding places
in lines unwritten or unfinished, leaps
through the cursive arc of my writing, calls me
to return to desolate hillsides, and ever I go, willingly.
BIO
David won the Ginkgo AONB Prize in 2023 for Best Poem of the British Landscape. His poetry has been long-listed in the National Poetry Competition, twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and won first prize and a special mention in the Sentinel Quarterly Literary Review.
In 2020 he was commended in the Poetry Society’s annual Stanza Competition his work has been published in several anthologies, in magazines, in film and, in 2019 one of his poems featured on television as part of a garden design project featured on Channel Five’s The Great Gardening Challenge.
David's books are:
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An Essex Parish (2015)
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The Celestial Spheres (2020) both available from Camuluspoetry.co.uk, and
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Jim-Jam-Julie (2021) available from olympiapublishers.com.
David writes on a range of subjects and his second collection, the Celestial Spheres, published in 2020, includes themes ranging between ambition, constancy, love, war and spirituality, but the central theme relates to how we are often moved or influenced by forces and people unknown and unseen.
Individual poems talk about migration, identity, masculinity and the long term effects of conflict.
David is also known for his poetry about climbing and mountaineering; he served on the judging panel of the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature in 2020 and 2021. He lived for a long time in Essex, but now lives in rural Lancashire.
UPCOMING EVENTS in 2024
Oct
Wordarium, @Dark Dukes, Dukes Theatre, Lancaster, 7:30pm
23
Sept
15
Kirkby Lonsdale Poetry Festival, Poetry Relay, 1pm
St Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale
Oct
HEADLINING Wordarium, @The Herbarium, Lancaster (Second anniversary!) 7:30pm
30
Oct
19
Lancashire LitFest, Poetry Pamphlet Shortlisted Poets, 2pm
The Storey, Lancaster
Sept
Lancaster Stanza Showcase, 7pm, King Street Studio, Lancaster. FREE
5
Sept
Lancaster Jazz Festival, 12 noon The Gregson Centre, Lancaster, FREE