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Jennie Osborne

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I wrote and read incessantly as a child and teenager, strongly influenced by Dylan Thomas, the Liverpool poets and the lyrics and rhythms of rock and folk music. Once I married and started work, life got in the way for twenty years, and it wasn't until my early forties, in Cornwall, that I started writing again, eventually bringing out my first collection with Oversteps Books in 2010, How to be Naked. This was followed by my second collection, again from Oversteps Books, Colouring Outside the Lines in 2015. I was both amazed and delighted to win the Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition in 2015 with First to Blink which is included in that collection.
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Both collections stretch borders, look at the world from unexpected angles. How to be Naked focuses more on the personal with themes of time, memory and relationship. Colouring Outside the Lines engages more with the wider world, a political and environmental perspective interwoven with the personal and the surreal.
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As well as being inspired by the countryside around, I am interested in the interface of poetry with art and music and find collaboration with musicians and visual artists fruitful. I am a co-author of the collaborative book Poets, Painters and Printmakers 2012 and my poems also feature in many magazines and anthologies, most recently in The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press) and several Grey Hen Anthologies - Songs for the Unsung, Reflected Light, Further than it Looks and Measuring the Depths.
I have been a member of Moor Poets since its inception and feature in its four anthologies

Alongside being part of Poetry Teignmouth's steering group, I am a workshop leader and Poetry School tutor, and a sought-after live performer.

​Website: ​www.poetrypf.co.uk/jennieosbornepage.shtml
Both of my books are available from www.overstepsbooks.com or from myself at jenniewordwitch@gmail.com at £8 each including postage or £12 for the pair.
To be kept up to date with my poetry events and activities, contact me at the same address.
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How to be Naked

First, you must take a train
to a station you haven't heard of...
you can cancel your milk and appointments
but you won't need to pack.


The station will look familiar
although you know you've never been there.
Its name is picked out in sunflowers.
It is the end of the line.


You can walk in any direction.
The sun will, in any case, follow you.
That house you see in the distance
is where you told your first lie.


All paths will take you to the beach
which no longer has ice-creams or donkey-rides.
Listen to the absent seagulls
and the heartbeating sea.


When you can no longer remember
your first kiss or your mother's name,
the exact colour of your eyes, or
why you came here, if you did


then you come to the easy part -
shedding clothes, exposing skin,
rolling over and over in sand composed
of tiny globes, of stillborn worlds.


From How To Be Naked
First to Blink

And on the rain-slick road in front of me
white-staring    staring me down
daring me down   not moving
luminous in the moment   in the car headlight
forty-mile-an-hour moment
flower-face   feather-face
saucer-starer   Blodeuwedd
taking me in
taking my lethal metal jacket in
and not moving     facing me down
claw gripping carcase
pinning me down

           till I blink   brake   swerve
           into the risk of oncoming

lifts upward like a leaf
letting go of gravity
curd of mist
of white ash
dissolving to night    to drizzle
blurring to peripheral

talons ungrasped
letting me run
leaving me smeared
furred and bloody
on the road

From Colouring Outside the Lines