Oystercatcher Two
101 POEMS
Steve Meyrick (ed)
Publication date
ISBN:
November
2025
978-1-923248-18-2
About the author
The poems in this anthology are drawn from two sources: shortlisted entries for the inaugural Robert Gray Prize for Poetry and material that we received in response to our call for submissions in April 2025. This was the second call for submissions made by 5 Islands Press under its new management, and once again it received a enthusiaistic response. We were forced to disappoint many fine poets whose work deserves to be read. Oystercatcher Two was conceived as a way of allowing us to publish more of it.
About the book
You will find here poems of passion and poems of wit, poems of reflection in a private garden, and poems that take us gunrunning in Africa or skydiving and skylarking God-knows-where. Here are poems that bear witness to the mindless cruelty inflicted on our fellow-creatures and poems of awe that celebrate unknowable inner lives. Here, too, are poems that excavate the roots of English in Greece and explore the Yorkshire dialect. And you will find sonnets and haiku, pantoums and ideograms, couplets and tercets and quatrains; prose poems and free verse and patterned forms that have no name.
What unites the collection is a shared commitment to making poems both timeless and timely, intelligent and intelligible, beautiful and urgent.
“… wondering if they could ever sense what the octopus
felt as it spun on the hook, searching for the sweet raw
tang of release, but tasting only noxious air, its sight
failing in sun-blinding light, the three hearts in its mantle
going into overdrive before losing power as its gills,
like tiny louvres closed.”
—JUDITH BEVERIDGE
from “The Octopus” (Winner of the Robert Gray Prize for Poetry)