ZOOMING IN APRIL 2026

We hosted another session of poetry with our talented friends on 7th April with a great line-up of readers. Sadly we forgot to turn the video on at the beginning, so Dónall's meditation on Irish 'demon testicles', Christine Vial's memories of her musical family and Tony Watts' ode to trees and his ballad of 'The Bard of Babel' are missing from this video of the event. But you can hear the other nine poets at these locations on the timeline:

1:00 – Chrys Salt (poems about over-age love and a stalker)

5:47 -– Michael Farry (a topical 'April Fool' and an exploration of the sensual properties of fruits)

10:17 – Kathryn Southworth (3 poems from her pamphlet about the Pendle Witch trials in which an ancestor of hers was indicted.)

15:16 – Clive Donovan ('The Roundabout’, ‘The Love Market' and 'She Smiles')

20:30 – Judith Wozniak ('The Lacemaker'; 'The Foundling' and a poem about her Polish father-in law)

28:57 – Jenna Plewes (poems lamenting the loss of bird species and nature)

28:49 – Rosie Barrett ('Homage to a Dog'; 'Summer Comes to Milburn' evidenced by cars caught in tide waters; and observations of the dolphins playing offshore in Devon.

32:58 – Sheila Aldous (two love poems)

36.41 – Anne Alexander ('Up in the Gods'; 'Wassailing' and 'Three Trees')
As always, it was a great pleasure to see so many friends and hear such a variety of brilliant poems. We very much appreciated seeing the friends who joined us as listeners, too: Timothy Adès; Ranald Barnicot; Jan Levin; Jenny Brown Barnet; Ray Poole; Phil Lawder; Audrey Ardern-Jones; Avadne Blandy; Jim Conwell; Alison Edwards, Sue Rothstein and Jean Hall. We hope that some of these listeners will be zooming with us as readers next month, on May 2nd.