National Poetry Day this year launched the much anticipated October edition of The Ofi Press poetry magazine. Consistently providing relevant reviews of poetry collections, alongside a core output of globally reaching poems to challenge and delight, the bi-monthly international poetry magazine is run from Mexico by English poet Jack Little.
Issue 38 includes my poem 'Receiver of Wrecks' and is available to read online here. By strange and wonderful happenstance, the poem is accompanied by a photograph of Whitby Harbour. Why is this strange? Whitby is the geographic heart of one strand of my ancestors from my mam's side.
One such ancestor, Henry Thornton, was a chemist by trade and poet by night. Born in 1867, he died aged just twenty-five in Whitby, where he is buried. Printing World (1892) notes that he was a novelist of no mean ability, [and that] several of his stories were now selling in book form, and others running as serials in some of our most popular work lines. A poem, discovered by my mam, can be found below. The words spoke to my soul when I first read them, especially: higher aim thy nervous art displays. Voice really does carry across years. Print preserves and nourishes us.
