It is my pleasure and honour to announce the Final Winners of the 2020 Cerasus Poetry Olympics:

Gold Medal: ICELAND (Mark Kilburn)

Silver Medal: FIJI (Sophie Norton)

Bronze Medal: OMAN (John Gallas)

Laurel Wreath: PERU (India Halstead)

Many congratulations to 4 most worthy champions and to everyone else who took part in this competition and made it such a positive experience (though by no means easy) to judge.

 

 

 

 

Please note that, for the duration of the Coronavirus epidemic in the UK, we will not be selling any books via our website. This is to avoid visits to the Post Office, which tends to be always crowded, in order to maintain ‘social distancing’.

All titles are still available on Amazon.

Stay safe everyone.

John Wilks is the Editor in Chief of Cerasus Poetry.

‘According To The Dandelions’ is a compilation of 50 of his poems, extracted from the body of work he has written over the past 50 years, loosely themed around Childhood.

His own childhood and adolescence, as you might be able to calculate, took place in the 1960s and 70s, so much of the content is nostalgic for those times. But don’t be fooled, it is not necessarily autobiographical.

The purpose of this compilation is to raise money for the BBC Children In Need Appeal and it is guaranteed that, for each and every copy of this book sold, £5 will be donated to that charity.

It is available now on Amazon, priced at £11.50 for a 68 page trade paperback, or in other formats as below.

Read a review on ABCtales.

Please note, although the theme is Childhood, much of the content is adult in nature and not suitable for children.

 

 

A free ebook in Portable Document (.pdf) format, featuring poems from all our published poets, is now available.

Whether you want to read a sample before you buy, or to gauge the type of work we accept before you submit your own, you can claim your copy by sending us an email.

Also available in paperback for £2.99 from Amazon.

 

 

 

 

Please read the illuminating blog about Julia’s life on the Mind website. Then buy her book.

We are now accepting submissions of novellas and short story collections, as well as poetry.

Please check our updated submission guidelines.

 

 

‘OUTBRANCHING’ by Scharlie Meeuws

“Words are my arthropod feelers with which I carefully sense my way in an outbranching world…

When a poem is a true expression of feeling, it can be liberating. The pace and timing of words reveal a full and surprising range of meaning, which I believe is best expressed through the use of simple language. While I like to depict the scale of events, scenery and emotions, I prefer to do so almost invisibly.

Poems are small on the page, but can swell to fill the mind.

In this collection, poems drift in and out of inner space, explore loss and death, love and feelings, forever interwoven with a thicket of branches, enlivened by an occasional cluster of colourful blooms.”

 

*Non UK customers, please check availability with online retailers such as Amazon, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Ewan takes us from his days as a self confessed adolescent arsehole, through his time as a cold warrior, to his abandoned attempt to become an ex-pat writer in exile, taking stock of his relationship with his father and various skirmishes with women on the way.

Yet he also takes us deeper into the past, to when it used to be all fields round here, to where an endless game of Risk had already long been played on a blood soaked board with real soldiers for counters.

It is tempting to believe that his years spent flying reconnaissance missions, with the world spread out below him unscrolling like a campaign map, tinged with hours of boredom and barrack room banter, shaped his poetic viewpoint, giving him a detached and strategic approach to deploying words.

But there is heart here, just not pinned to the sleeve of his flight jacket.

* Non UK customers, check availability with online retailers such as Amazon, etc.

 

‘painting for lemonade’ by sj howarth

when life gives you lemonade, there is no way to turn it back into lemons, yet this pitcher of poetry retains its acidity and leaves an occasional pip on your tongue, while reminding that each of us is a momentary citrus-tanged effervescence, caught somewhere between sharpness and flatness, in the greater froth of life

though we are taken to familiar poetic haunts – the coast, the countryside, paris – we are also drawn to more mundane locations – mcdonalds, tescos, his mum’s attic – and shown the bleakness of everyday life at one remove – from the top deck of a bus, via a commuter train window, through a living room wall –

 and yet, in those same places, we find small, brief moments that cumulatively (spoiler alert) make us realise that life IS beautiful, after all

read a review here: www.abctales.com and here: www.amazon.com

 Available to buy now in two versions:

 

*(non UK customers, check availability from online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, etc)