The Wharfedale Poets' first collection 'Drystone Lines' was launched at the Ilkley Literature Festival's Fringe Event on 8th October 2014. It is dedicated to Walter Swan who died in Spring 2014.

Copies can be obtained from  http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=drystone+lines&type=

Walter Swan

Everyone here at Wharfedale Poets was deeply saddened to learn that one of our number, Walter Swan, died suddenly on 21st April 2014 of a suspected heart attack. He was a sensitive, kind and very talented man who played a vital role in our community and we will miss him beyond measure.

IN  THE  NORTH

This year I saw a winter quite anew

and watched the darkening days devour the light,

reduce the sky’s palette to sombre hue,

leach crags and dales and walls of modeled life.

Each day another pace towards a dark,

a place of velvet black of deepest mystery, 

a void enclosed within the flakes of bark

the sculptor made which draws me in inexorably.

But we both saw the void the sculptor rimmed.

You see the edge, I see the whole within. 

The rim which contrasts faintest hints of green,

which gives us hope beyond our dream.

We too are more than each upon our own,

so together see both dark and rising dawn.

Andy Goldsworthy’s work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,December 2007.

Reading

In the gap between an English afternoon and evening,

we're let into the bookshop, leaving the dishevelled city

with its relentless pavements for the civilisation

of folding pine chairs and carpeting; books.

She enters to held breaths wall-to-wall. She's slight, tanned,

more this, less that than anyone expected, hair bright as a globe.

She shows slides: cooking monkey in Gambo, on a pirogue

up the Zaire river, getting stoned by children in Senegal.

But my eyes are on her more than the pictures. She brings me

the world on her feet, skin, breasts, in my own tongue.

It silences me, an islander holidaying on other islands;

Ibiza, Crete, Tenerife. A woman walking continents raises dust.

Willing to see more sense in a grain of desert sand

than in all of England, I queue for her book, her signature.

Meeting her eyes, I receive my blessing and leave smiling.

We all do. We have been saved: already we are less ordinary.

Mandy Sutter

Mandy's new novel, Stretching It, a light-hearted look at love, papier-mache and caring for an impossible parent, is available at Amazon UK

At least

At least, he said
you'll get a poem out of this.
Yeah, I thought:
a short one.

Mandy Sutter