This is Mark's blog.
In early 2021, four of my poems and a mini interview was featured in the Flapper Press online Poetry Café.
The article was contributed by the North American poet Annie Newcomer, of Kansas, by invitation.
It was nice to receive the coverage for my poetry in America.
Here is the link:
Delayed from December 2020, my latest collection of rugby poems, Sevens, was published by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop in March 2021.
It presents 7 new poems written since the publication of Sidelights in 2017. Included is a sequence of poems ‘Three All Black Greats’ in honour of several of New Zealand’s finest rugby players: Christian Cullen, Julian Savea and Jerome Kaino.
An addenda features seven other rugby related poems I have recently been sent or have published as an editor/publisher. Poets included are Tony Beyer, Margaret Jeune, Jane Matheson, Bill Sutton and C A J Williams.
The book constitutes a seven-a-side game, two halves of seven poems each or two sides made up of seven poems each.
Two of my poems are included in volume no. 12 of the series Katherine Mansfield Studies.
It is a distinguished scholarly journal published by Edinburgh University Press and is an honour to be included.
My poems celebrate Mansfield, an author I have been an admirer of since student days. The issue acknowledges it has been 100 years since the publication of Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories, one of my favourite Modernist short story collections.
The issue was edited Enda Duffy, Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin, eminent Mansfield scholars.
June 2020 saw the release of an anthology of national lockdown poems by myself, Alex Jeune and Margaret Jeune.
I put together the sequence from our poems written during the COVID-19 national lockdown period, March to May 2020, in New Zealand.
The book gives three differing perspectives by New Zealand poets on the global crisis and is our personal responses to it. Our book is not meant to speak for everyone’s thoughts and feeling during the lockdown period in New Zealand. We hope it gives an affirming sense to readers of what we have all been through and endured during the lockdown in New Zealand.
It is published in the relaunched ESAW Mini Series (No. 39).
Here's the link to the publisher's blog:
https://michaeloleary.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/esaw-publishes-lockdown-mini-book/