I joined Somewhere Else Writers in late 2017, little imagining what has happened since. And what I am about to describe would not have been achieved without the creative spirit and support of the group.
POETRY; three books of poems. At the Storm’s Edge in 2020; A Different Land in 2022, (Palewell Press ); The Light Will Always Return in 2023 ( Tim Saunders Publications); publication in print and on-line journals.
GWN Poetry Prize in 2022; readings at Cheltenham Poetry and Literature Festivals.
Poetry Together National Initiative; worked with students of two primary schools to write poems on the theme of Happiness and share with older people. Both schools won £250 to spend in their School Library.
Worked as a volunteer with the Cheltenham Poetry Festival in 2024.
DRAMA: Two podcasts with Ragged Foils Productions, Family Gathering and Detach from World. “A Death in Flanders“ broadcast on Cirencester Radio; two other radio plays awaiting production, Fallout and Terminal.
I have also written several short stories.
So, many thanks to my former and present members of this group.
You can listen to Frank reading some of his work below.
Finding Tyndale at Nibley
In principio creavit Deus
caelum et terram,
terra autem erat
inanis et vacua.
A field of wheat, sides squared and neatly hedged.
As we come close, no weeds or flowers wild,
orthodoxy ripening as it should.
We enter, leave the budding woods, then out, onto
the escarpment, his tower tall and stark.
Its apex bears a golden cross refulgent.
Nearby, felled timber, neat-stacked, like faggots,
sufficient to incinerate thinkers
independent, heretics, men, women
seeking their single way towards God’s words.
This was his boyhood’s country, lived between
the Severn and these hills, open to the
winds, contrary, turbulent. Hard questions
grew amongst his learning, thorny,
provocative, answers growing hidden,
seeds in a husk of silence, nurtured later
in the thickets of deeper learning: Greek,
Hebrew, flowering in the glottal stops,
cadences and plosives of everyman’s
tongue. The ploughboy reads his Bible, pausing
longer at the turning of each furrow.
Around us in the rough, demotic ground,
knapweed and ragwort, hemp agrimony,
campion, sorrel, vetch and burnet rose.
Universal Credit
Learn this lesson: assume the supplicant’s
position, low before the arbiter.
Hang your petition on the ox’s horn and
pray as it turns and plods inside the keep.
Forty two days in the wilderness, longer
than Christ’s self-chosen stay. Time to go home
and count the copper pennies in your palm, time
to scour the bins for corn cobs overlooked,
scraps on bones, nubs of bread, hide candles
and kindling, beg remission on your rent.
Time to forage hedgerows, scrape bark for baking
bread, claw the furrows for potatoes, hush
the hungry child while you lie clamped and clemmed,
fashioning hope from feathers and dung.
You may be lucky: beneficence
parsimonious may be granted or
day on day on days delays will find you
in winter’s shadow outside the castle walls.
Somewhere Else Writers Group 