The Swansea Poet’s Gallery
Poetry Into Light is excited to launch the Swansea Poet’s Gallery! Here we deliver some of Swansea’s finest established, emerging and new poets, through audio, film or written text to share and celebrate talent each month!
June 2024
An enchanting audio of Mark Lyndon’s ‘Beguilling Gull…’
Beguiling Gull...
Clacking rocks onomatopoetically crack.
Hissing seas recede astride sibilance.
Its sparkles speckles sprinkle quicksilver slivers across slanting sands.
Glistening serenity's transient ambience represents magnificence.
Slumberous summer sun stumbles, tumbles in spectacular free-fall; gilding, gliding, abiding in hiding.
Luminosity glows nevermore.
Evermore-haunting tenebrosity grows exponentially within the western heavens.
Even evening's inconsequential light evanesces then gently surrenders to sightless night.
Imagined sandman slinks, soporific and unseen, amidst mystery.
Lurking behind shadows' opacity, fantastical Mr. Myth lures one and phantasmal all towards his ephemeral netherworld.
Hushaby! Lullaby bonny-bairn bay who snoozes, content on her rose-red seabed.
Timeless cliffs noiselessly clock off 'neath dreamy umbra.
Dazed, they doze at day's demise.
Wistful cirrus wisps whisk.
Tantamount to intangible is this nebulous nothingness on a ness.
Itinerant mist shifts; gives up the ethereal ghost.
Here, hoar haar forms lily-lovely pillows upon cyan ocean's blanketing horizon.
Carefree be, caressed by sleepy sea's reverie.
Elated, elevated, forever revel in tranquility's infinity.
Woozy woods sway.
Bunched branches weave, and wave a surreal adieu to the retreating tide.
Groggy, craggy caves choose to close their eerie eyes, stealing forty weary winks.
Overhead, overheard, veering ever-nearer, a poetic silhouette scythes skies; slices silence.
That spectral gull's winging smile beguiles.
Effortlessly ineffable, she sails fugacious dusk's cusp, 'twixt twinkling stars .
Hear enchanting euphony serenade brindled briny.
Let us sketch avian grace and entrancing elegance.
Bewitched, watch her etch the leaden empyrean with elan.
Numinous sublimity invisibly alights on a darkling brook which trickles seaward; pretty in perpetuity.
Bio
Mark Lyndon, is a retired teacher from Swansea. He’s been a performance poet/singer at myriad venues across South Wales and beyond for many years. He runs 'Market Malarkey', a monthly open-mic event at Uplands Market in Swansea and organises 'A Turn for the Verse,' a band of bards that travels to perform informally at beautiful locations within Wales.
Mark has hosted at Talisman Poetry in Swansea, as well as at Brown's in Laugharne, and has been guest poet on several occasions. Being an archetypal Welshman, Mark has also penned poesy in Welsh and is rather partial to a song. He is a keen chorister with the highly-acclaimed Dunvant Male Choir.
Books published:
Once More Unto the Beach, Dear Friends, Once More and A Bard's Eye View.
Mark’s had one hundred poems published in The Evening Post, numerous magazines and the following anthologies: Ten Swansea Writers (Talisman), In the Midst. A Covid Anthology (2020), The River Widens Anthology (Merrimac Massachusetts).
July 2024
Featuring Rebecca Lowe, who also read at the July 16th Grand Ambition Open Mic.
Here is Rebecca’s visceral audio of her enchanting poem ‘Celebration’
Celebration
I choose to celebrate the miracle of being,
of synapses snapping in unison, the pulse
of nerve, electrons pounding
the heart’s rhythmic bass,
the music of muscular syncopation.
I choose to celebrate the intricacy
of bones, I celebrate each arterial
cobweb, I celebrate the coverings
and oozing of flesh, I celebrate
blood.
I celebrate blood transubstantial,
that flows torrential, the saturation
of oxygenated vein, the blue
and the red, I celebrate skin,
sacred and holy, every pore,
pock, stretchmark, and wrinkle.
I celebrate ten perfect toes
and the tender tendons,
I celebrate life in all its
throb and thrust,
I celebrate vagina,
I celebrate womb,
I celebrate all that I am
and the many lives
I can contain.
I celebrate brain,
hypothalamus, cerebellum
and cerebrum, I celebrate
thought, the electrical
impulse of my logic,
I celebrate the chemical
imbalance of love and lust
and furious beauty.
I celebrate the convex lens
of my inverted eye, cornea,
retina and dilating pupil,
the balance of inner ear
and cochlear transforming
wave to music, I celebrate
tendons, meniscus.
I celebrate every thread of life
that runs through each convulsing nerve
I celebrate death, I celebrate birth
and all that comes between
and the miraculous accident
of my being, on this tiny,
whirling planet, lost in the
blue vortex of time and space,
spinning.
Her perpetual dance
of stars, the trembling into being
of every nascent thing,
The outrageous grace,
of every perfectly
imperfect day.
Bio
Rebecca Lowe is based in Swansea, UK. She was the 2020 Bread and Roses Spoken Word Award Winner. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3. She has three published collections, Blood and Water (The Seventh Quarry Press, 2020), Our Father Eclipse (Culture Matters, 2021) and Grandmasaurus: a book of verse for children. She recently published Write Mindfully, a book for aspiring writers and is currently editing Peaceweavers, a Culture Matters anthology of radical peace activists. Rebecca is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and recently read for the Swansea and District Writers Circle. She runs writing workshops and the Swansea Talisman Spoken Word Nights. She is a trained editor and journalist.