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.
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.
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 |