E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

British poet Isabel Galleymore, pictured, won the anniversary competition for the best poem involving eyes, vision or eyewear in a poem...  Judging was tough.  The competition was in 2015!  Yikes. Anyway, below is her winning poem.

She has won £110 (in honour of our tenth/eleventh anniversary years of 2015/16) and we need to pay her still!  Hopefully Eyewear will meet up with her this coming month and hand it over in cold hard cash...
Isabel Galleymore's first pamphlet, Dazzle Ship, was published by Worple Press in 2014. Her work has featured widely in magazines and she won the London Magazine Poetry Competition in 2015. She has just completed a PhD at the University of Exeter and is currently the Charles Causley Poet-in-Residence.



False-Eyed Frog

The forest’s false-eyed frog turns at the sight of a snake or rat
to reveal a Venetian mask on her arse
and like these eyebrows that raise
upon her trembling hips,

a padded bra pegged out
on next door’s line stirs in the humid afternoon…

SUBMIT UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT!: http://store.eyewearpublishing.com/pages/the-best-new-british-and-irish-poets

As the saying goes: judging poetry is like judging a friendship, or flavours of ice cream, or whether you can make the jump from one low wall to another. Nobody knows how or why you’d want to do it, you have to try very hard to maintain objectivity and you’re likely to end up lying on your back with no friends, covered in ice cream.
That said, judgement and being judged is fairly central to any creative endeavor. When I talk to students at open days I try to put their minds at ease about the whole marking process. How can you assign a numerical grade to a work of art? It’s no different, I argue, to the reality of professional (or semi-professional or committed amateur) writing. Whether by an editor, an agent, a producer, a critic, a reader standing in a bookshop deciding what to buy: your work is going to be judged. Deal with it. (It now strikes me that this probably isn’t…

France has a history of seeking secular neutrality among its citizens - and a more recent history of violent attacks on its citizens by foreign fighters associated (by themselves and others) with a particular form of fundamentalist religious belief.

None of this should permit the sort of scenes that unfolded today in Nice - sadly a recent victim of a horrific mass slaughter - when police officers surrounded a woman on a beach there, and ordered her to remove a piece of clothing she was wearing.  A "Burkini".

This is wrong for many reasons, and we here count four:

Firstly, France is the home of international fashion.  The very ethos of fashion is that while some styles are in vogue, many outrageous, outre and shocking styles can be worn publically. The bikini itself is, in many ways, a product of the cinematic glamorous Cannes lifestyle that sexually-provactive French culture has long endorsed in its more liberal phases. French fashion also has a disturbing historical associatio…

TERENCE TILLER’S LOVELY SHAPES OF RHETORIC:
AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS COLLECTED POEMS

Terence Tiller died in 1987, in December; 29 years later this autumn his Collected Poems is to appear, on his centenary. His poems, often explorations of love and desire, and often set in Egypt during World War II, are almost the poetic equivalent of the Bogart-Bergman film Casablanca. Tiller, who is more or less a forgotten figure now, published three volumes with the New Hogarth Library in the Forties. Poems was the first of these, from 1941; his second was The Inward Animal, from 1943. His Third, Unarm, Eros, from 1947, completes a trilogy of wartime poetry arguably unequalled for its extravagant lyric modernism.
One of the few contemporary critics to write on Tiller is Andrew Duncan, who emphasizes the sensitivity and sensuousness of mid-century poetry, especially Tiller’s. Tiller ‘seems to have devoted much time to writing poetry which was sexy and romantic’.[1] Duncan also notes his importance for fu…