sheenaghpugh | A poet you might like: Rosie Shepperd

People are always asking me where they can find new poets, by which they generally mean where online, i.e. without finding somewhere to buy a book or magazine. Well, this poet hasn't got a book out yet so about the only place to find some of her work together in one place is online here (the site of a big competition she got shortlisted for). There are a few errors on it, which I hope'll be removed soon; site editors have real problems with getting poetry up right, specially anything with unconventional/individual layout.

And as you'll see from the first poem there, "I love you, Sheila Mackenzie!", Rosie is nothing if not individual. For one thing there's the joyous freedom with which she uses the entire page, not just the left-hand side of it, but almost more unconventional than that is the strong narrative element. A lot of poets fight shy of that in fear that it'll end up sounding too like prose. Mind you, with the sort of stories that happen in her head, there's not much chance of that. I'm very fond of Mr and Mrs Jarvis, in "Syzygy", flying past the second-floor window in that matter-of-fact way that is somehow so much more dislocatory than astonishment. Characters come strongly through these little narratives (the woman who voices the poem to Bernard, for example) and that's often not what people think Poems Are For either. I've got nothing against the poem as lyric moment (Rosie does those too, now and then) but reading some mags, and indeed collections, you could easily come away with the idea that the lyric moment is all poems can do. Rosie's are a good corrective to that. I love the humour too.