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.

Read more >>

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 >>

You know you’re getting on when you start to notice white hairs on the heads of your children … In ‘Stopping at the Sleeper Bridge’, Patricia Pogson treads a well-worn path through a familiar landscape and half a lifetime of memories, in the company of her daughter.

Read the poem>>

I missed you by a quarter of an hour.
I should have hurried through my morning shower,
missed eating breakfast in the sleepy sun
or read no emails, or replied to none …

Sue Millard’s granddaughter Naomi died last year of a rare form of cancer – Wilms’ tumour – six weeks before her sixth birthday. ‘Missing’ is the harrowing yet cathartic poem written in response. Read more>>

The children are ahead, pretending to be adults
walking and talking fast.
We are dressed like old people.
Even our stooped shoulders look real.

At a time of year when many parents have just deposited their children outside university halls of residence, Elizabeth Stott puts her eye to the other end of the telescope in Alumni>>

Don’t giggle at its shape –
girls have had babies with vegetables before …

If RS Thomas had been a lass, would he have written something like Josie Shinn’s ‘Supper in Wales’? Just a thought. Probably a stupid one. To see what we mean, click here>>

Poet Clare Crossman grew up in Cumbria and lived here for many years before relocating to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, and then leafy Hertfordshire.

You can take the woman out of Cumbria etc – and in this week’s poem, she’s back On Cold Fell>>