Writing as Roger Philip Dennis
INVOCATIONS AND PORTRAITS
ISBN 978-0-9545474-2-4 Publication date 3rd January 2023
Wylde Publications
Supporting the Wild
www.wyldepublications.com
A collaboration between poet and musician Steve Day and artist-tutor and poet Roger Philip Dennis
consisting of 54 paired poems featuring a variety of form and subject matter, unified by being one way or another portraits and/or invocations
Steve Day is shortlisted in this year’s Bridport Poetry Competition, has published 3 previous volumes of poetry, also prose works, and magazine articles (What’s New, Eureka, Avant, Jazzwise, and Serious.)
He has recorded eight albums of music and poetry. Current album: Day Evans Dale Ensemble, Green Money (Discus, 2022.)
Roger Philip Dennis:
- First prize, The Poetry Society National Competition 2014, and:
- long-listed PSNC 2015 (“nearly 13,000 entries, among only 111 poets who were in the running at the end,”)
- long-listed PSNC 2019 (“over 16,000 poems, 125 poems including yours remained in contention,”)
- long-listed Ginkgo Eco International Poetry Competition 2019,
- published in Acumen magazine.
His prose writing was awarded an Arvon Foundation Apprenticeship & Bursary for novel writing.
He teaches painting two mornings a week in his Chudleigh studio.
I & P Readings
14th January 2023 Ashburton, Quaker Meeting Room at 2.30pm
28th January 2023 Teignmouth, Alice Cross Centre at 7.30pm
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
The winning poem in the 2014 Poetry Society National Poetry Competition:
Corkscrew Hill Photo
All afternoon she counts the sounds
until the fly-specked room crackles with silence.
Even the song thrush noteless. A thick drizzle
trickles rivulets down the window pane,
smears distance on fields, curtains-off hills
and greens the sagged thatch,
aches in the creaking gate and screws
watering eye to misting glass:
a hearse skids slowly up the muddy lane
blurs in droplets on a spider-web
spins sideways into darkness….
….rattling cough of cattle, rusty tractor,
hinge of paint-peeled door, gears
of cars forced to back in one-track lanes,
buzz of pylons spanning the hum
of outboards in the yachtsmen’s creek,
yelp of kids in the converted Mill
the soft click-click of a camera-shutter
up Corkscrew Hill….
The casement steams with sunset. She picks herself
up off the floor, mouth dry as mourner’s grin.
Her arm reaches, shakes, reaches again
gathers the clattering jar from the shelf.
“Cider?”
The landlord frowns, sniffing cat,
moth-ball, mould. She squares her back
on his fine view – the duck bob,
seagull clutter, gape of lime kiln.
“And a nip of lovage,”
before he can point her
the off-licence hatch in the yard,
“to keep out the damp!”
and smiles spittle.
Her flagon scrapes a scroll of varnish
the length of the bar’s stripped pine
past bleating townies, past the regular’s chair
and the corner where the photographer
sits draining her valley
through a tilted lens.
To find it with an accompanying filmpoem, judges' comments, and more details:
http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/corkscrew-hill-photo/
It appeared in print in the Spring 2015 edition of the POETRY REVIEW
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/publications-section/the-poetry-review/
Other Links:
Interview with Roger McGough on BBC Radio Four's "Front Row:"
to an interview by Rebecca Gethin on her wordpress site:
https://rebeccagethin.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/roger-dennis-national-poetry-competition-prize-winner-2014/
Readings
28th January 2023 Teignmouth, Alice Cross Centre at 7.30pm
14th January 2023 Ashburton, Quaker Meeting Room at 2.30pm
10th July 2020: Ashburton Arts Centre - 8 poets reading
7th July 2015: Ledbury Poetry Festival, Ledbury.
3rd July 2015: Launch of Ways With Words Literature Festival, Dartington.
online: at The Poetry Society (see link above.)
