Derek Healy

I grew up in Cheltenham at the foot of the Cotswold Hills and now live in Great Malvern, the other side of the Severn Vale. I started to write poetry in the 1970s but, as with many an aspiring poet, my output was limited by the pressures of working life and a fragile self-confidence. Taking a degree in English literature probably, on balance, didn't help.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to take early retirement (from a career in mental health social care) in my mid fifties, and since then my life as a poet has taken root and flowered. I like to look at serious themes, sometimes humorously, and humorous themes, often seriously, both in traditional and free form styles. I would say that Philip Larkin has been the most pervasive influence upon my style and approach.

I have published three full length collections - Made Strange By Time (Matador) , Home (Graffiti Books) and Uncharted (Graffiti Books September 2022). My poems have also appeared in a number of poetry journals, including The Lyric (USA), The Road Not Taken (USA), Orbis, The Seventh Quarry, Graffiti, The Salopeot, Common Threads (USA) and The Cannon's Mouth, as well as in a number of anthologies, including five Gloucestershire Writers' Network Cheltenham Literature Festival competition prize-winner anthologies.

My new volume Uncharted focuses upon uncertainty and times ahead. Poems touch on many unknowns – our expanding universe and humankind's future within it; the outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic; our own personal trajectories and ambitions; and the 'unchartedness' of trying to write.

Rona Laycock

Rona Laycock is a poet and short story writer who runs creative writing courses and events for writers in and around Gloucestershire. Her work has been published in national and international magazines and anthologies. The classical Japanese poetry forms of haiku and haibun formed a significant part of her poetry thesis at Swansea University, where she studied successfully for both an MA and PhD. She was, until 2023, the editor of the writing magazine Graffiti ( now sadly closed), and her first poetry collection, Borderlands, was published in the form of an audio CD in 2009.

Rona's first collection of poems with Graffiti Books appeared in September2022. Thousand-Year Whispers is the result of two years spent wandering in the National Arboretum at Westonbirt, Gloucestershire during the Covid years of 2020/21. Woven through the facts, myths and legends surrounding the trees are excerpts from a journal kept during those strange times. It is not a botanical reference book but something to dip into at leisure and I hope it will encourage the reader to do their own research into the natural world whilst enjoying a bit of 'forest bathing'.

Rona's poetry, short stories and autobiographical writing have been published by:

Honno; Gomer; Orbis; Contemporary Haibun; Cinnamon Press; Seventh Quarry; Equinox; Borderlines;Mslexia; Haibun Today; The Countryman; Roundyhouse; Conversation Poetry; Wilts and Glos Standard; Leaf; Fire; Interpreter’s House; Magma Poetry; MIR Online; Haiku Poetry from Wales; The Lake Poetry; Acumen; Poetry Space; Peace and Freedom Press; Edge Festival.

Rona's poetry and other writing have won, been shortlisted or highly commended in the following competitions and published in their anthologies:

Ware poets; South Bank Poetry; Erbacce; Bridport; The Plough Prize; Liverpool Lifelong Learning; Manchester Cathedral Poetry competition; The Coventry Poetry Prize; Linkway; Settle Sessions; Welsh Poetry Competition; Norwich Open Poetry Competition.

GILL GARRETT

Gill's first full length collection of poems entitled Waymarks was published by Graffiti Books in December 2020 (see Books tab of this website). After writing on health care for many years, in retirement Gill Garrett found a second home in poetry and non-fiction. Her work has been published in a wide variety of poetry and prose journals and anthologies, and she is the author of Digging Up The Family – A Lesson In Social History (Matador 2017) and Once Upon A Time In Wales (Aspect Design 2024). She has twice won the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network poetry prize at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and won the Onward poetry prize in 2013 and the Bashley Herland poetry prize in 2018.

Gill Garrett’s second collection, The Photo I Didn’t Take, focuses on the small, seemingly insignificant aspects of lives, places and events that so often offer deeper insights into our everyday existence. With her we travel to destinations as diverse as wartime Reykjavik, an up-for-sale pub, abandoned allotments, the duty-free shop at Bristol Airport; amongst a host of others we encounter a seasonal worker, a church organist, a deceased grandmother, a graduate returning for a college reunion. All have their stories; these poems both tell and question them.

Reviews of Gill’s poetry include -

“ --- many of the poems are built on territory recognisable to the reader. It is these touches of the shared familiar that make friends of them as we meet them on our way through the book, triggering every so often a sudden recognition, a whispered “Yes.” (Ann Drysdale)

“The poems claim a space between past, present and future, always with an awareness of how the past acts on the present. The language is detailed and precise; I particularly liked the light handling of metaphor”. (Angela France)

Gill remains a member of Women Aloud and Catchword groups in Gloucestershire but has recently returned to her roots in South Wales. She lives in the Wye Valley, where she writes, walks and wonders why she ever left.

Susannah's first collection with Graffiti Books, entitled Suncatcher, appeared in 2021. Suncatchers are reflective ornaments made of transparent materials such as crystal, glass and silk. They are designed to catch the light, as too are the poems in the collection - the light from poetry, creativity, the sea and precious memories.

Susannah was born in 1964 and grew up by the coast in Dawlish, Devon. Her love of the sea often permeates her poetry. After studying English and Drama at Swansea University, she had some success as a fiction writer, being shortlisted for the Ian St James Awards in 1991. Her focus changed from prose to poetry when she joined the Dewsbury Writers in Yorkshire, publishing her first volume of poetry Shall I? in 1996 (Spout Publications).

Susannah trained as an English teacher, then studied an MA in Writing for Children at Winchester. Since 2002 she has lived in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, where she has been a keen member of the Catchword writing group. Now retired, she enjoys writing by lakes at the Cotswold Water Park whilst her husband, Steve, fishes. She was was longlisted for the international Erbacce Prize in 2020 and won the national Swanwick Writing School poetry competition in 2015 .

SUSANNAH WHITE

FRANCES MARCH

Looking Out, Looking In is a life story crafted in meticulous verse by the Stroud-based poet Frances March. Launched in early March this year (2023), it has won well-deserved plaudits:

" clear-eyed and forgiving, humane but never sentimental" (David Clarke)

" confessional, but, more importantly, love letters to the past and hope for tomorrow." (Roy McFarlane)

"gentle humour capturing every nuance..." ( Jenny Farley)

This is Frances' first published collection. Since retiring from her career as an English teacher her single-minded focus has been poetry, helped and inspired by wonderful mentors and friends in the Cheltenham poetry scene.

KIM TAPLIN

Malvern poet Kim Taplin has recently (May 2023) had his collection of poems Ebb & Flow published by Graffiti Books. This is Kim's second collection - his first, Warp & Weft, appeared in 2021 (Aspect Design).

An ordained minister of the Church of England, Kim resumed his poetic career just before the Covid pandemic, after 40 years applying his creative juices to classroom lessons, school assemblies and pulpit addresses.

The poems in Ebb & Flow are readable and resonant, employing a refreshing variety of moods, styles and forms. In them he questions the rigid dichotomies which shape much social, moral and religious discourse. Those who claim to possess the whole truth invariably distort it, often in ugly ways. The quest for truth is a navigation of tides that are never still - they ceaselessly ebb and flow.

Iris Anne Lewis

Originally from Wales, Iris Anne Lewis now lives in Gloucestershire. She writes mainly poetry with an occasional foray into short stories and short radio plays. She has been published in a variety of on-line, print and broadcast media and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. She has won 1st prize in the Gloucestershire Poetry Society competition and Graffiti competition, and has been placed in many other competitions including the Wales Poetry Award and Stanza competition. She is also featured in the Silver Branch Series on the Black Bough Poetry website.

Iris is active in her local literary scene, participating in open mics, readings and workshops. In 2018 she founded Wordbrew, a Cirencester-based group of poets. As one of the prize-winners of the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network annual competitions, she has been invited on several occasions to read her work at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Amber is Iris’s debut collection. Ambitious in its scope and lyrical in tone, it takes us travelling through time, exploring ancient history, stories and myths and leading the reader to find the relevance of old ways to today’s human condition.

Reviews of Amber include:

"A visionary poet with a richly lyrical and transportative voice, Lewis takes us travelling through time in her beautifully realised and vivid poems. Without losing a sense of the real, this gifted poet enables her readers to experience deepest history, myth and private emotional worlds. These are poems that are wide-eyed with wonder, mesmerising and magical. This is poetry at its most alchemical." (Anna Saunders)

"Iris Anne Lewis is a poet who holds us in her thrall. In Lewis's work, we time-travel, plunge back deep into the past and are exposed to the alchemy of the word. These are poems of fire and ice, of liminal spaces and ritual. A poet of great scope and ambition." (Matthew M. C. Smith)