PIPE CREEK SWIM

I scrape through the blackthorn gap,

arms scratched, legs rasped. A curlew startles.

Springtides lap salt-marsh. On the creek's brim

I'm knee-deep and glasswort drowns.

The egret, like a white question mark,

asks, Will you swim? Ripples lick the mud,

tide still rises. Will you swim?

It is silkier, smoother than sea,

a glide through dark drifts of leaves and sticks

which flicker and part. I sip

river, half salt, and the moment slips –

a clip of a room without windows

where I sit with five men, think

rivers, fishing trips, picnics on banks,

gone in a wink. Back, to hunker

by blackthorn, wind-dried, skin sleek

as river, fooling myself I am

unseen. My blank white pad is scribbled

with shadows, shapes between reeds

shift. Ribs buzz upstream. What's your

business?

asks the egret.

Lydia Fulleylove

SEA

Even when I'm not in the sea

I am sensing her. The sea is in me.

I am thinking of her when

I am writing, when the dry wind

rattles the stubble, when my skin burns

and the leaves of the chestnut tree

shrivel at the end of summer.

Even if it is hours

or years since she has held me,

I am thinking of the sea.

Lydia Fulleylove

"An oasis, a space for reflection and for laughter as well as for writing. We all come back every week, ready to share three hours of reading, talking and writing, our lives left behind".

Member of prison writing group.

Current projects and news

Lydia is currently taking part in an Arts Council funded project May 2016 to May 2017: Ferry Tales is a group of poets, musicians, writers and a photographer in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight who are running events, exhibitions and workshops for local people on the theme of arrivals and departures in their lives. www.ferrytales.org and Ferry Tales on Facebook.

Lydia has also been commissioned to write three poems for the Chalk Poets anthology, connected to the South Downs and other chalk landscapes. She will be reading at a Chalk Poets event at the Winchester Poetry Festival 7-9 October, 2016 and the Chalk Poets anthology will be launched and on sale from this date. www.winchesterpoetryfestival.org

Recent - Estuary

Lydia's second collection Estuary was published in October 2014 by Two Ravens Press and launched at Dimbola Gallery, Freshwater, Isle of Wight as part of the Estuary exhibition that showed work from Lydia and artist Colin Riches.The project tells the story of a year on the estuary of the Western Yar on the Isle of Wight, using poems, diary extracts and visual images from artist Colin Riches.

"This is amphibious writing, moving effortlessly between richly detailed prose notes and the poems in which shape and pauses play their parts. You read on and it makes less and less sense to draw a distinction; they are facets of a sensibility adept at holding differences in balance - between the inner world and the outer, between practicality and imagination, speaking and listening, human and natural, and between a close prison world and the wide sky and water. As Keats suggested, maybe the ability to embrace such opposites is poetry"

Philip Gross

Lydia Fulleylove is a UK based poet, writer and facilitator. She is most at home when out of doors, whether in the hills, woods or by the sea.

"Wild places and the rhythm of the seasons are integral to my work. I see writing as a form of exploration and experiment, rooted in the senses, a voyage through observation, memory and reflection to the shaping and crafting of a ‘final’ piece"

The power of place is often significant in the workshops she facilitates with a wide range of community groups, including schools, mental health and prison. Experience or memories of particular landscapes offer a focus through which participants may explore thoughts and feelings. One workshop member expressed it like this:

"Looking out is often a way of looking in - then looking out again"

Lydia has a strong interest in combined arts projects in her work with community groups and she collaborates with other writers, artists and musicians.

"The energy created by the meeting and overlapping of art forms has also inspired my own writing, making me realise that ‘no art form is an island’. The act of looking - the giving of attention through whichever sense - has informed all our collaborations"

Lydia was shortlisted for the Forward Best Single Poem Award in October 2010. Her first collection, Notes on Land and Sea, was published by HappenStance Press in June 2011 and is available from HappenStancePress.co.uk

© Lydia Fulleylove 2014. Photography Richard Mair, Colin Riches and Jeff Pigott. Website design Jeff Pigott