GREEN TREE PUBLISHING Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.

 

Issue 2 of 'oxygen' was produced in October 2021.   Contributing poet Judith Green wrote:  'I have been enjoying ‘oxygen’ which arrived in my letterbox yesterday. It is a delight to explore the written and the visual. There’s lots of space in "oxygen" which gives the reader the opportunity to savour each piece of work without feeling rushed, rather like being in an art gallery where you feel free to stand for as long as you want and lose yourself in what is in front of you.'  oxygenpoetrymagazine.blogspot.com    

Issue 1 of oxygen came out in April 2020. It is a collection of poems, images and articles.  From all the submissions, I try to choose works that possess a sense of completion and significance that is not laboured, nor contrived. Of course, labour is put into artistic endeavour, but it shouldn't show.  Having made the selections I then try to weave them together to create a whole as if the separate works are having a conversation with each other, with diverse points of view.  Every time we create something we take a risk. It may fail. It may not be understood or appreciated by others. We have to accept that, and keep going if that is what we want to do.  Sometimes there is some lovely feedback from contributors and readers. Jan Price, who has contributed poems, photographs and art wrote in praise of the care that went into the first issue, saying that: 'all have come from an experienced editor who treats her writers with the respect they crave.' oxygenpoetrymagazine....

Democratic Poetic is a gathering together of the finest poems published in Poetry Matters from 2006 to 2019.  By 'finest' I mean, keen or sharp, as a tool. That is, poetry that does something, effectively. In my reading of each of the poems those chosen gave me a reason why they should be included.  I also asked the authors of the poems to provide an introduction to themselves and their work based on the ways in which poetry plays a part in their lives and what it means to them. The responses were marvellously varied and rich. But perhaps the one that impressed me the most was from Joan Parker: 'I was never really "into" poetry. Then one day while supervising an exam in a very hot room, not even a poster on the walls to read, only the bent heads of thirty-five hopeful students at eye-level, I watched some birds in an old twisted tree outside the window. I mentally composed a poem to keep myself awake and as soon as I got home, wrote it down. I have always been a ...