Jacci Garside lives up in the hills near Renwick, where there’s little to do except pore over clothes catalogues and fret about soft furnishings, and write the odd poem.

So here’s an odd poem, called Curtains >>

Coming home one evening through moorland
an owl, alert with night, cuts across your windscreen.
You stop, and for a moment feel flight alive, pure …

Deborah Hobbs experiments with the road poem as a cure for love in Road A686 >>

“Charcoal dense clouds connect themselves to / a blue-black Scotland and the darker distant sea” and Sam Smith connects himself to a struggle with the wind and waves on Maryport prom, in Poetry Day 2012 >>

“Who like you / could be the rock that breaks / the black meniscus of the pond … ” Carlisle poet Annie Foster asks a long and difficult question, on her way back into the world after grieving.

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For all your eyes
you won’t look at me.

In this week’s poem, Josephine Dickinson vividly reimagines the peacock with his ” … devil’s voice, / the walk of a thief.”

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not many resting here
made old bones

What is it with poets and country churchyards? Here’s Mick Yates mooching about in Milburn, out on the East Fellside in the Eden Valley. Read his poem, epitaph >>