It seemed like a good day to write about this. MISREADING THE DREAM OF THE ROOD – SHEFFIELD, 1 A.M. Bearn: born in a barn, a bairn, a cry in the night, an almost inaudible moan on the wind. Leaking like methane escaping from landfill. There’s always a child half-awake, half-aware that comfort has vanished. Treow: a true line. A tree line. Heartwood, hill’s heart, spore-home, flame-home. Hwaet: wait, wheesht, hold your tongue. Branches creaking, rip at the grain. Trees hold tight their scars: longdraggle rubble-years, small fires on hillsides. Birch dwarfed by metal, pigeons on phone masts, fen ..read more

I was told that my first words, lisped in the early 1940s, were ‘flowers’ and ‘airplanes’. So here was Nature. And the place? A new build (finished in 1938) of small, pebble-dashed, semis and detacheds and a couple of terraces a short walk from the terminus of London Transport’s No 64 bus route. The developers allegedly ran out of money before they completed the planned works, which included another ring of houses that would have surrounded the oval of ‘The Green’. This meant that our garden fence backed onto waste ground which got quickly covered in blackthorn and hawthorn scrub, and, as part ..read more

From time to time, when I’m reading for The Rialto, I come across poems that I really need to write about. Usually my long running wrestle with procrastination gets in the way, but when I wrote the recent Newsletter I found that I was writing about a poem from Issue 99 that I really like. I thought I’d share it with readers who don’t get further than the front page of the website, so here’s my close reading of Louise Watts’ poem.   WITHOUT I go outside at twilight in the high wind to put the tins and plastics in the recycling bin and think of the way that I have imagined this place – the ..read more

We have now received the results of the 2023 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Ian McMillan and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Kharkiv Zoo’ – Anastasia Taylor-Lind 2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Spoons’ – Jo Bratten 3rd Prize of £250 – ‘I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field’ – Lisa Kelly 
The three prize winning poems will be published in issue 101 of The Rialto. Ian also selected five highly commended poems: ‘What the Dragonfly Told Me’ – Rosie Hadden ‘Synecdoche’ – David Nash ‘How to Ma ..read more

The Rialto and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature invites you to join us online on zoom, with Editor of issue R98, Edward Doegar, for a reading from The Rialto issue number 98. To celebrate the issue we are co-hosting an online reading that showcases the diverse intellectual and emotional work in the magazine through six readers: Kevin Maynard will read translations from the seventeenth century Italian poet Tommaso Campanella; Carol Watts’ reading will include her brilliant poem of solidarity for those caught in the Ukrainian war, Tim Tim Cheng read from work that explores the full poli ..read more

‘…when I write about being a cyborg, I challenge reality’ —The Cyborg Jillian Weise, ‘How a Cyborg Challenges Reality’ (The New York Times) ‘Every sexuality has a knowledge and technology and every new way/to move beasts from one crate to another produces a metaphor’ —Holly Pester, ‘Are You Writing About Love?’ ‘A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.’ —William Carlos Williams, ‘The Wedge’ You’re probably reading this on a machine. But what does that mean? Is a machine a single discrete object, or would it be truer to describe it, like the body, as a composite of many variously siz ..read more

A radio show I sometimes tune into has a long-running feature where listeners write in about objects that have fallen on them from out of the sky – a slice of white bread, an unopened Mars Bar, jar lids and bottle caps, once (or did I imagine it?) a lady’s watch. These surrealist bombers are presumed to be birds, hence the feature has come to be called ‘crow drops’. One of my favourite kinds of poems has something in common with the ‘crow drop’. Usually short, always unexpected, these are the poems which arrive from out of the blue and leave you slightly dazed at the sudden strangeness of the ..read more

We have now received the results of the 2022 Nature and Place Poetry Competition back from Gillian Clarke and are delighted to announce that the winners are: 1st Prize of £1000 – ‘Blame the Fox’ by Jane Lovell
 2nd Prize of £500 – ‘Whales in the Forth’ by Cecilia Rose
 3rd Prize of £250 – ‘Ghosts’ by Lesley Saunders
 The three prize winning poems will be published in issue 99 of The Rialto. Gillian also selected eight highly commended poems: ‘Heeling in at Lower Wood’ by Alison Binney 
‘Trapper’ by Nicky Kippax
 ‘Hymn to Sheep’ by Mary Mulholland 
‘Letter from the Moon’ by Christin ..read more

The Rialto 97 is printed and subscribers’ copies should have arrived. There’s been a long gap. I suspect that I might have found it difficult to return to the routine of reading submissions, having had a break from doing so while Degna was compiling No. 96. I also suspect that I was startled by the excellence of issue 96 into thinking its a heck of a hard act to follow. Here’s what I’ve written about 96 in the Editorial to the new issue: ‘It’s a magnificent selection of work that shows poetry turning away from the too frequently quoted, too vengefully misused, half line of WH Auden’s, ‘po ..read more

The next issue will be edited by Edward Doegar. This is the third part of our current grant project which has seen our Assistant Editors taking charge and has so far produced Degna Stone’s The Rialto 96, and Rishi Dastidar’s commissioned pamphlet, The Sea Turned the Colour of Honey by Holly Singlehurst. All poets are welcome to send work to be considered by Edward, but please read what he has written about the forthcoming issue before you do so. You can submit poems either via Submittable or by post to The Rialto c/o 74 Britannia Road, Norwich, NR1 4HS. Please mark the envelope clearly ‘FAO Ed ..read more