Gary Evans: ‘We’re motoring across the fields and down the track in the dark before dawn. The newborn lamb sits tucked away in my coat, zipped right up, so just her little head peeps out. The wind whooshes in my ears, eyes streaming with the cold. An orphan’s only got a couple of hours.’

Ian Seed: ‘Here I stopped because I could not remember how to conjugate the verb. In any case, I had an excuse not to continue for at that moment a military parade appeared at the end of the street. It was led by a general in a jeep. ‘

Alan Zhukovski: ‘A village can look so much bigger than cities, whose high-rises loom in each suburb.
A countryside minute can sometimes be longer than days in the shrunken dimension.’

Ian Seed: ‘Yesterday evening when I stopped as usual to say hello and try out a little more of my Italian on Tiziana, I saw, from the corner of my eye, Anna walking down the street hand-in-hand with her fidanzato, her tall, blue-eyed, but (thank God) balding beloved. She was smiling at something he’d said. I tried not to look at her, but when they passed, Anna turned her head vaguely toward me. Her green eyes caught mine for a moment, then turned away.’

James Russell: ‘While he fronts his oratory and we voice
the sweet breezes from our belvedere

we are agreed that he is growing fond
of himself, rather as did Jerry Lee Lewis after

his first hit (so we reminisce between sighs).’

Colin Honnor: ‘Glimmer cradled light on the waves of leaves
after the olive light on dusty leaves, after
the grey-green and black rain
into the nets, you he all of them
ritual, half-year’s rite to gather
threshing the filled branches with your canes
the olive rain, the hard bitter stones.’

Christopher Steare: ‘He looks out
from his lantern turret
onto mountains mirrored in water,

one old man of Coniston
reflecting on another.’

Peter Riley: ‘A chorus of 15 bronze heads singing in the museum at night
the music working to its close, “The Philosopher” the brain song,
earth-toned lines, earth-bound demands, this
is all there is going to be, where the sun never shines.’