Poem and image recovered for Hungary this morning

from Motivist Suite

                              for Michael Egan

 

 

 

Freedom tosses her garland into the stormy sky

 

sun catches the wall plaster turns it

to sandpaper angled in sandy light at sundown

a jay jaywalks across the crazy paving

 

a halo could strangle a struggling saint

what chance the nymphs with pitchers on their heads

tangled in the tresses of the fountain’s willow?

 

the rough monument fingers the flag at half mast

 

*

This poem, part of a long suite written in 2011, came to mind last night with the defeat of Orban in Hungary. It also reminded me (the ‘sandy light’ etc.) of this photograph I took of a wall in Budapest. I used it before on this blog to dismember and unremember the death of Mararet Thatcher, but, it too, seems to have found a second ‘moment’ this morning.

Here is where that image was, with different texts of mine: Pages: Thatcher Dead.

 

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard: HOLME FELL: A Sample of Landscapes Number Two

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. 

Here's a second poem and photograph. The project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public, i.e. PUBLISHED. More details later. 

While the presentation of text and image may differ from this format, for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ I will present a poem and an image that relate quite closely together.

Here is a second piece from the sequence and a second image to accompany it. 

10

 

Blue peaks, shiny but wrinkled,

under the ragged underbelly of thick cloud.

 

The sandy alluvial fingers of the middle distant fell.

 

Far off: icy caps, hunkering down,

unvisited.       

 

            A sample of landscapes

            for human choice:

 

            I cannot think myself unstunned

            by their rival majesties even

                        through recourse to evasions

                        of the artifice of selection

                        and election,

                        a window on diverse

                        confluences

 

Unpopulated space but not unpeopled

(even through planet time):

the stone wall pens in speckled ground,

be-ribboned by its shadow,

and stony paths trail down upon thick woodland

 

On a road or track

at the base of the far blue rockface, tracing the valley:

a speck of white van or truck pinpointed

 

How much of that prickly sliced-raw cliff face

was once worked

the human unworked

by its sharp treachery?

 

 

John Casson, 27 November 1901, aged 25, Quarryman. Deceased was turning off a new working when a huge mass of rock fell from the side and buried him. No one suspected any danger from the quarry side, as it had been in the same condition for quite a dozen years.

* 

This is the first poem to introduce documentary text into the 'flow' of the sequence, and, hopefully, of the book. (More of that later.) There are a number of such pieces, particularly as the text becomes more 'post-industrial'. No video this posting. 

 *

Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.  

*

The first 'showing' (also a Hub post for all the 'Holme Fell' posts) may be found here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

ELLE A VERSE NOVEL Reviewed

I’m pleased to announce that Billy Mills has reviewed my latest book, Elle – a verse novel on his impressive blog.

The review may be read here: Two Broken Sleeps – Elliptical Movements.

 

I thought his description of the main ‘character’ spot on: ‘And then there’s the titular Elle, or “She”, Belle without the B, who is both a character and not one, and who merges at times with Christine, the woman murdered in the Brighton story.’ The text is based on Belle de Jour and 'the Brighton story' is of a terrible murder. I particularly hope other readers will concur with Billy’s reflection: ‘What the book achieves, in the end, is to replace the double victimhood of Christine, once at the hand of her husband and again at the hands of his judge and jury, with a sense of her power, of her being, in spite of everything, in control of her choices.’ 

I describe the process of writing the ‘novel’ here, with some account of the backstory that is described in more detail in the book’s ‘Afterword’: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition. I also described the book again, on its publication, here: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.  

‘It’s a tour-de-force of a book,’ Billy concludes, ‘in which Sheppard makes the verse novel his own.’

Elle may be bought here: Robert Sheppard - Elle, a Verse Novel | Broken Sleep Books.

 

Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. I am going to blog one poem and photograph (and maybe more) once a month, as the project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public. 

We are in discussion about how to present text and image, but for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ we shall present poems and images that relate quite closely together.

Here is a piece from quite early in the sequence and an image to accompany it.

 

 Holme Fell 4

 

Heavy blue-grey clouds

low over russet-green pines

surround the old quarry reservoir,

the rock ground peppered with snow.

 

The water’s surface is frozen,

broken in places, a slow thaw.

The blue-white peaks of the Langdale Pikes

draw back from this arrangement,

a lone tree stretching something like human scale.

 

My father refused to enter forests and thickets

and he’d have turned away from

the darkening embrace of this wood, preferring

cricket-pitch open spaces, though this frozen expanse

would have also reminded him of the Polish death march.

 

There’s nobody about, it seems at first,

but the place is humanised

in unprogrammable ways,     

                                                by looking.

 

Zoom in, and you’ll spot two people

                                                one in a blue coat

coming out from the wood, following

the exposed bank of the reservoir.

Trev Eales is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts and festivals, based in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. He and I met at university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions and entertainment. He has a website here:  Trev Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s an interview with him about his work:  Capturing the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in threes, so here’s a third site:  Articles by Trev Eales’s Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack site.

All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.  

Burnt Journal 1965: the last one and the photograph of David Hynes (and a look back at the series, with links and vids)

Here is my final ‘Burnt Journal’ poem, written when David Hynes asked me to write him a birthday poem for his ‘significant’ birthday, and to read it at his party in the Casa in Liverpool in October 2025. I did so, David illuminating my page with the light on his phone!

David is a photographer, whose work I like a lot. When the poem was accepted by International Times or rather by the poetry editor, Rupert Loydell, Rupert and I began to discuss images to accompany it. The poem had already suggested a lead. Weirdly, and Tom Phillips notes something of this in his commentary on a couple of the images (see below), the photos were predominantly grim, and not the Swinging London 1965 images I’d imagined, or even hoped for. You’ll see that in the poem. In fact, some images suggested the relative isolation of Kirkby, where David and his siblings grew up. When Rupert was searching for photographs (would one of the Kinks work? No.) I wondered whether David had an image that might work, and asked him one night. He flicked his phone, scrolled through his photographs and discovered the one we finally used: ‘The Field of Forgotten Dreams’. I’ll say no more about it, or about the poem, but let you access both, now they are published in International Times:

HERE: poem and photograph may be read/viewed HERE: Burnt Journal 1965 | IT

Many thanks to Rupert Loydell and International Times, and to David for providing the image so promptly! Thumbnail below.

(c) D. Hynes, 2026

I’ve written a ‘number’ of poems in my ‘Burnt Journal’ non-sequence of poems. Modelled on the ‘Empty Diaries’ sequence (in a way), I have decided that I’ve written the last ‘Burnt Journal’ (as I’ve also written the last ‘Empty Diary’ and have vowed never to commit a sonnet again): this one for 1965. There’s enough of them, it strikes me. But I’d not – until today – realised just how many there were. Unlike the ‘Empty Diary’ sequence, which runs from 1901-2025 (with a 1372 (Petrarch) and a 2055 (cyberpunk) thrown in for bad measure), the ‘Burnt Journals’ do not faithfully track the ongoing passage of the years they name. They are occasional poems in the sense that the occasion is the birthday, or rather birth-year, of a friend. They all use the pages of Tom Phillips’ marvellous collection The Postcard Century which is a chronological collection of postcards. The book is useful in that the selection of year-based material is clearly pre-arranged. Originally, I thought of it as collecting for me what I’d had to scour image-sources for (pre-Internet) in the writing of ‘Empty Diaries’. (I had 90 sheets with the year on them and filled with data from many sources and then used the sheet for an improvised writing (mostly).) The occasions usually burst in upon me with little warning, so I’ve had to work quickly, clutching at the Phillips in haste.

In the picture above, you can see a copy of the Phillips, ready for use at any moment, behind me on the shelf!

But now it's time to block the growing automatism of the choice of material and move on, but not before chronicling what I've been up to so far, to date. 

I’d not thought how many of these poems there were. There are actually 21, which, as the number of the age of majority as it was, seems appropriate to birthday verses. I’d never ordered them either, other than in the (first?) six I published in Berlin Bursts in 2011 (asterisked below). 

Of course, there are a number of ways of assembling a full list: The order of the writing of the poems, or the order of the birth-years of my (mostly poet) friends? Taking the latter as a rule we get:

Burnt Journal 1924 for my father *

1929 for my mother *

1939 for Lee Harwood *

1944 for Allen Fisher *

1948 for Mary Prestidge (probably to remain unpublished: they don’t all ‘work’)

1949 for Gavin Selerie and Alan Halsey *

1952 for Geraldine Monk

1952 for Frances Presley

1952 for Cliff Yates

1955 for the 1955 Committee (friends, including me!)

1956 for Patricia Farrell

1965 for David Hynes (the subject of today’s post, the last in the series)

1968 for Simon Perril

1969 for Peter Manson *

1970 for Geraldine Roberts-Stone

1973 for Scott Thurston

1977 for James Byrne

1977 for Chris McCabe

1978 for Eleanor Rees

1978 for Rodge Glass

1979 for Sandeep Parmar (possibly to remain unpublished)

You will see that I had to use the same ‘material’ twice, even thrice, for some ‘years’. The two 1977 poems were written together, but the 1952 ones weren’t. In fact, by the time I was writing the poem for Cliff Yates I’d forgotten I’d used the material before, and came to it quite fresh. It’s – again – only today that I’ve noticed this.

I’ve also read them all through in the order arranged above. So far, I’ve only discussed process, and form (a number are sonnet-like structures). But they do relate to one another in terms of content (even to following Phillips’ clear decision to include as many postcards of Piccadilly Circus and Eros, which can be traced in my squinty borrowings). A weird snapshot of the year of birth of the dedicatee, which, of course, they can’t remember! Motifs recur, and a sense of the given year is presented, though it is often surrealised, rather than realised, as it were.  (I’ve never put any of them against their corresponding ‘Empty Diary’ poem, either, but that’s another possible tracking of my cockeyed world building.)

I’ve written about the sequence before on this blog, particularly whenever poems are published online, so I could link directly to the texts, and it would be good to mark the abandonment of the sequence (pushing me into a radical quandary if I need to produce another birthday poem anytime soon) by posting some links to some of the poems, in chronological order of their dates, here.

Burnt Journal 1924 Pages: for Claude Sheppard

Burnt Journal 1939: Pages: Robert Sheppard: For Lee Harwood Burnt Journal 1939 (from Berlin Bursts)

Burnt Journal 1949: for Gavin Selerie and Alan Halsey: Pages: Remembering Gavin Selerie and his laugh. I notice I have an oldish video of me reading the poem. Here:

Burnt Journal 1952: the one for Frances Presley (also on IT): Workless Washday: Burnt Journal 1952 | IT

Burnt Journal1952: the one for Cliff Yates:  https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2022/12/robert-sheppard.html

Burnt Journal 1955: for my bunch of drinking friends, aged the same as me: Pages: Burnt Journal 1955 for the 1955 Committee (including me!)

Burnt Journal 1970 for Geraldine Roberts-Stone: Robert Sheppard sees the future in the past | Stride magazine. And here’s a video of me reading it fast enough to get it into a format short enough to post on the blog:

 

In ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ I wrote of ‘Empty Diaries’ and the then-unwritten ‘Burnt Journals’, but I had a third phantom series, ‘Drowned Books’. Maybe I should use that title for a new sequence. (‘Wiped Weblogs’ is a section of ‘Empty Diaries’ by the way!) Enough! More than Enough! For now! 'Lost Logbooks' is another possible title that came to me in the middle of the night!

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com. Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social

One review and two poems in Tears in the Fence 83

I usually post on this blog to alert people to the fact that I’ve published a poem or two in Tears in the Fence or – more recently – an announcement of a new review or two in this excellent, long-running magazine.

This time I have both some poems and a review and I thought I’d offer an account of both contributions in what looks like a very interesting issue. (I’m writing this before my copy has arrived.) Thanks to David Caddy for choosing the poems and for letting me choose Tim's books from his list of books for review (and for allotting a large space for it). 

Let’s detail the review first. This is a long review of three books by Tim Allen: A Democracy of Poisons, Shearsman Books, 2021, Peasant Tower, Disengagement Books, 2021, and Very Rare Poems Upon the Earth, Aquifer Books, 2023. These three, the first constructed, the second condensed, the third extemporised, demonstrate how Allen’s sensibility works within different literary processes, and how he, and his readers with him, can see the world anew, refreshed in all its post-surrealist ‘daily miracle’, to quote Lee Harwood quoting Louis Aragon. They also show how the finest contemporary British poetry, as exemplified by these books, can restore us to the fullest of imaginative possibilities. (There's also a review by Keith Jebb in this issue of yet another book by Allen!)

To read it, though, you’ll have to buy this issue. Indeed, why not subscribe? Details are to be found here: Tears in the Fence 83 is out! | Tears in the Fence. As I say, it contains lots of goodies.

 

To read my poems, too, you’ll have to buy the magazine. I have two examples of my recent work, ‘Radio Therapy’ and ‘Empty Diary 2024 in the Style of Empty Diaries’. They are not related (other than they were written by me).

‘Radio Therapy’ is (unusually for me) the result of a ‘real’ experience: the experience of listening to the radio while I was having radiotherapy for prostate cancer and realising that I was listening to Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Voodoo Child’ (it’s no longer styled ‘Chile’). I imagine it as another of the poems ‘about’ or ‘round and about’ music that seem to be moving towards some sort of ‘collection’. Listen to it, particularly the way it opens. Then imagine a radiotherapy machine encircling you! Sublime!

 

(I know from reading this poem in public that people are immediately concerned about my health. As I put it on my annually updated biography on my website: ‘I’ve been recently passed from consultants into the monitoring gaze of nurses.’ It’s quite nice to be no longer of interest to the profession, though I’m grateful for the continued monitoring. Information on Prostate Cancer may be gathered here: Prostate Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK. And, yes, we DO need a screening programme in the UK!)  

The second poem, ‘Empty Diary 2024 in the Style of Empty Diaries’ is the penultimate poem in that sequence ‘Empty Diaries’. I’ve written of it elsewhere, but it is worth recalling that it began in the 1990s, early poems published as a book from Stride in 1998, and reappearing as the ‘spine’ of Twentieth Century Blues. It continued on into the twenty-first century, until 2025. One poem for each year, basically: 1901-2025. This one is less egregiously sexual than others in the series, and is about AI rather than edging or conspiracy theorists (to pick a couple of the other themes in recent specimens).

*

I wrote about my previous reviews in TITF here:  Pages: Tears in the Fence 82 Reviews Reviews Reviews, and about the review before that and about reviewing generally (my thoughts about it and literary criticism, and me) here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing.

Here’s a pretty fulsome post, with links, and videos, about the ‘Empty Diaries’ poems over the years: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The last two Empty Diary poems are published on Stride

And, finally, here’s a contribution to the Tears in the Fence website that I’d completely forgotten: an account of my ‘European Union of Imaginary Authors’ project from 2015:  The ‘EUOIA’ collaboration | Tears in the Fence.

Happy reading!

My 21st year of blogging reviewed! A hub post to the year

Every year I celebrate another year of blogging. Last year I did that in the conventional way of looking back at the previous year,  here, Pages: My 20th year of blogging: links to favourites!, but because it was the 20^th year, I decided to look back meditatively at those two decades of blogging in their own right: Pages: 20 Years of Blogging - some thoughts about my over 1500 posts, posted on the day, and this one tries to pick the best/favourite posts from the 1500 posts since 2005: Pages: Looking back at 20 years blogging: the best posts 2005-2025 (with links)!

This year, the task is easier. I’ve only got the last year to look at. Even so, there is one strange feature about most of this blogging year (February-February), and that was my ‘project’, marked by its extreme uselessness, of posting my dream diary for 1975, that is, of each dream on its 50^th anniversary. This post collages ALL the dreams into a sort of prose piece and explains itself, here: Pages: Dream Year 1975; or: the solipsist’s headparty (as a text).  (I’ve not made up my mind at all about what to do with it.) Here’s one of my favourite inconsequential dreams (with helpful image): Pages: Dream Diary Tuesday 29 July 1975.

Big book news for me was Elle: A Verse Novel, published by Broken Sleep, and there are a couple of posts pertaining to the book, probably the most informative being this one: Pages: My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books.

This post was important (to me) in that I was thinking about Stars: A Comedy Machine, my (still unpublished) ‘Dante’ poem, about Philip Terry’s ‘Dante’ poem (which I was reviewing), and about reviewing in general, which I seem to have returned to with some energy:  Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing.

 

This post features the set lists of 3 readings I did in March 2025. I like to collate such things: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists). I was back at the Ainsdale venue in January 2026, as I demonstrate here (with more pictures by Ron Davies): Pages: Another reading in Ainsdale at Poets' Corner and Ron Davies' photos.

I was deeply moved by the death of poet friend John Seed during the year, and posted about him here, also finding myself surprised about how many posts I’d made concerning his work on this blog.: Pages: i.m. John Seed (with links to posts on his work).

 

I largely drafted my talk for this Glasgow University conference in memory of Jerome Rothenberg in a series of posts. You might as well go to the final thing, in full here: Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin America, January 2026. (All the other papers by others are there too, of course.)

 

After my 2016 book The Meaning of Form I’ve been thinking (on this blog and in my journal, and putting some of the latter up on the former) about form. Here’s a few initial thoughts about pushing beyond the Derek Attridge influenced thesis of my book: Pages: From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms. In early February 2026 I returned to this theme and posted the following long post: Pages: FORM (again!) on Tom Eyers and Speculative Formalism.

 My daily writing practice (which I early dubbed ‘Ark and Archive’) reached page 1000 this year, and I thought I’d share it with you. I sometimes make poems out of it (but other times it’s simply a way of keeping ‘writing fit’), and I celebrated that here, with a little video of the thousandth page and of examples of how it’s been used: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 - keeping a daily practice of writing going.

In the latter half of 2025 I posted a number of posts about the British Poetry Revival, trying to find new things to say about a subject I’ve already talked myself hoarse on. Here’s a couple of new things in one of the posts: Pages: How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat.

 

Lee Harwood on the cover of Poetmeat.

Indica Bookshop: the Ashers leaving

I really enjoyed my tongue-in-cheek hangdog prose for Rupert Loydell’s Stride on ‘Deflated Ego’. I took it very literally! Here’s a post on that: Pages: My DEFLATED EGO on Stride (a mini essay on my creative summer torpor). Note I think that some of the other excellent posts in the series just weren’t deflated enough! (There's a link to the Stride piece too.)

Three online magazines (so far) have published excerpts from my ‘Tone Poem’ poems about recent jazz. Here’s a hubpost to find those, and some reflections on the rest of the sequence: Pages: TONE POEM and my other poems about music (links).

Brandee Younger (and harp), one of the featured musicians

I always have a few personal matters on here, but this one shades over into poetry: a ‘Burnt Journal’ poem for all my friends (and me!) who were 70 in 2025. See them posing here in the Belvedere. Read the poem here: Pages: Burnt Journal 1955 for the 1955 Committee (including me!).

It was good to be included in a tribute book for poet and organiser Ric Hool; see here for more on the book, and on Ric: Pages: Tributes to Ric Hool included in A Landscape Pulsing with Life (one from me).

 

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com. Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social