Tag: poems

Bending the Arc

April 16, 2025

At last it’s time to reveal what I’ve been occupied with for the last few months!

Along with 4 other amazing women; poets Alice Willitts and Hilary Watson and novelists Katherine Stansfield and Laura Baggaley we have been immersed in writing and thinking about the future in a slightly different way. We were all interested the environment and were concerned by the many crises the planet was experiencing but were finding that much that was being written was either bleakly dystopian or unbelievably utopian. We wanted to learn about what was possible for the planet rather than a future that was only full of doom and we wanted to find a way of writing about it that was different.

So, we followed Manda Scott’s (self-study)* Thrutopian Masterclass. Each week for six months, we heard from changemakers and practitioners in a dizzying range of disciplines and discussed how we might incorporate these lessons into our own thinking. It was a crash course in practical, concrete information, covering (to name just a few) net positive cities, regenerative business practices, alternative political structures, new currencies, circular economies, renewable energy projects, new employment models, theatre collectives, sustainable agriculture, heroic myths, sociocracy, ecological civilisations…

We were inspired, and started writing our own stories of how to negotiate the world we’re in and how to write thriving desirable futures into being. We realised that in order to make change, people need to be able to be able to see what is possible and want to go there, if there are no narratives, how can they make the choice?

We then realised that we needed to spread the word and encourage others to find their own ways through the world we’re living in to a future that is hopeful and liveable, so we decided to create a Substack magazine filled with ideas and writing across all genres and traditions and after several months of writing and planning and more writing and asking people we were particularly admired to write for us; here it is – Bending the Arc: a Thrutopia magazine!

https://bendingthearcmagazine.substack.com/p/welcome-to-bending-the-arc

Come and join us!

*Thrutopia is a term coined by the environmental activist and philosopher Rupert Read in an article in Huffpost in the context of trying to explain how we get from where we are now to a future that is sustainable. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-read/thrutopia-why-neither-dys_b_18372090.html

Two Years Old!

July 2, 2023

It seems incredible to realise that Auscultation is two years old! I hardly dared dream when I was working long stressful hours as a veterinary surgeon that I would ever see my poems in print but when I was around 45, something changed. I started to take my writing more seriously, go on courses, join local poetry groups and start to put the hours in. I think I came to understand that to write good poems, you do have to work at it, they don’t arrive fully formed in your head, you have to draft and redraft, edit furiously and critically, leave them and go back to them and even park some for years in the ‘not quite right’ folder. I learnt to accept that there will be many more rejections than acceptances and came to love the joy when they were published and to realise when they’re not, it’s just a numbers game, there are so many good poems and poets out there, only so many of them can make it into print.

I was lucky that Amy Wack, the editor of Seren Books, liked my poems and chose my pamphlet The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels as the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet in 2015 and then had enough faith in me to accept my first collection Auscultation too. I shall forever be grateful to her. Sometimes you need a bit of luck along with the hard work.

So to celebrate the 2nd birthday of Auscultation, here is a poem from the book

Miss Freak’s Whelping Forceps                 

Wrapped in cloth in a Gladstone bag

boiled in second best saucepans, now here

laid out on velvet in this museum case;

delicate, slim shanked, small angled loops to cup

the head and ease it through.

Mr Hobday’s at the front,

the pioneer with his rigid rings of steel

to clamp the foetal skull and lined up behind,

McLean with longer shafts for deeper access,

Elliot with thicker loops for crushing action.

How they laboured, these men,

with their unforgiving fists of metal

but in the feral hours where instinct loosens

itself from shadows it’s Miss Freaks we reach for

to coax the unborn to crown the light.

Maybe getting your poems out there is a little like coaxing them out into the light after a long labour, harder than anything you’ve done before but so worth it in the end!

Cafe Writers Competition

February 11, 2023

https://www.cafewriters.co.uk/home/poetry-competition/

Delighted to have a poem commended in the Cafe Writers Competition.

The poem is called My Body is a Map of all my Journeys and is a meditation on the journeys a body takes over its lifetime and how life events can alter it. It also describes how we perceive our bodies and how we try and alter them. I’ll be reading it and another of my poems at the competition winners event on Monday 13th March at 7.30pm. It’s on Zoom, so contact Cafe Writers for the link. Hope to see some of you there, can’t wait to hear the winning poems!

Poems from Auscultation

July 7, 2021

Here is a link to a couple of the poems from Auscultation

Roadblock, was Seren’s featured Friday poem at the end of June and is the story of an evening visit to an injured horse. Below that is a video of Miss Freak’s Whelping Forceps, a poem about the design of this specialist instrument and how men and women have different approaches and ultimately

in the feral hours where instinct loosens

itself from shadows, it’s Miss Freaks we reach for

to coax the unborn to crown the light.

https://serenbooks.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/friday-poem-roadblock-by-ilse-pedler/

The launch night for the collection is Tuesday 13th July, it would be lovely to see you there. Tickets are free.

Register on Eventbrite

It’s Here First Collection!

June 19, 2021

My first collection, Auscultation, will be available from Monday 21st June from Seren. https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/auscultation

It’s a collection of poems written over the last 8 or 9 years but I suppose really a record of 30 years experience as a veterinary surgeon, stepmother and mother.

Auscultation means listening and specifically, in medicine, listening to sounds that come from the body’s internal organs. I have spent 30 years listening to animals and their inner sounds but also the concerns of owners and the stories of how animals play a central role in many of their lives. I’ve heard stories of cruelty and horror but also of such love and empathy I have been moved to tears. The consulting room really is a privileged place and the role of a veterinary surgeon can feel like a balance between healer, confessor and counselor at times.

The language of animals; how to restrain, coax and understand them is a skill learnt over a lifetime and I am still learning. I am constantly in awe of animals, their ability to adapt to situations and interpret them, their stubbornness, playfulness and honesty and in the case of horses and farm animals, their sheer bulk and majesty too. There are also poems about euthanasia and ending an animal’s life, the part of the job that all vets dread. These are the animals that wake you in the dark hours and make you question what you do. It’s a sad fact that the veterinary profession has the highest rate of suicide of any of the professions and this is explored in a few of the poems.

Other poems in the book are about my childhood and my experiences of being a stepmother and mother and the rollercoaster ride that parenthood takes you on. Here, listening and being listened to are central themes too, how the voice of a child can be ignored and the damage that can do and how we interpret motherhood according to our own experiences. The last section in the book is about being a step mother, the joy and heartache that brought and how, in fairy stories, stepmothers are always portrayed as the evil ones. These poems are deeply personal and a record from my point of view and of course the situation for all blended families is different and highly nuanced.

There will be a launch reading on Zoom on 13th July. Do get in touch if you’d like to be sent an invitation.

Breaking the Line

May 24, 2020

photo-1524801155596-a02266e670ba
What makes a poem a poem? So many things that books have been written in answer to to the question! What is interesting me at the moment is the use of white space on the page. As Glyn Maxwell famously wrote in On Poetry ‘Poets work with two materials, one’s black, one’s white’ and it’s the interaction of the two that not only frames a poem but allows it to breathe. Even more than that, the white space has been likened to a musical score, giving instructions to the eye on how to read and the ear on how to receive.
Line breaks are an integral part of these instructions, the emphasis they bring to the word at the end of the line or the word at the beginning of the next is central to the construction and interpretation of a poem.
Holly Pester used a great example in her article in Poetry News Vol 109:2 Looking at ‘The other plum poem’ by William Carlos Williams

To a Poor Old Woman

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

In four short lines, moving the line breaks has created a pattern of different meanings and emphasis and intensified the sensation within the poem. Wow, powerful things these line breaks!
Here’s one of mine, the title poem from the pamphlet and one where line breaks play a significant part in the reading and meaning of the poem.

The dogs that chase bicycle wheels

stare out of windows,
checking the boundaries

checking the boundaries.

They have territories to protect,

circling

from the backs of sofas

to front doors,

to kitchens,
whole worlds held in their flat eyes.

Postmen breach defences,
dropping offerings
to be bitten, ripped and pissed on.

Straining to a point always
just in front of their noses,
the click

clicking of bicycle wheels

tricking them into the frenzy of a chase
for the white scut of a rabbit.

Unceasingly they scout crowded horizons
for what is not there,

will never be there.

Easter Wish

April 11, 2020

I’m not really one for prayer but it strikes me that in these times when it seems like the whole world has been put on pause, people are still reaching out to each other with words of care or comfort and support is being given in surprising and inventive ways. One phenomenon I’ve noticed is the way that people are signing off emails and messages has changed. It got me thinking and so here is my wish for you.

Valediction in the Time of Covid.

I am no longer yours in faith or sincerity,
I cannot be the granter of wishes
or kisses
in these interrupted days,
I can however issue instructions
in the hope they fall as talismen
Keep well
Stay safe.

Seren Poetry Festival

January 1, 2019

Programme

I’m really looking forward to reading at the Seren Poetry Festival in February. What a fantastic series of readings and lectures. I’ll be reading at the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet prizewinners lunch on Sunday 10th and am excited to meet the prizewinners from other years. You can book tickets from the above website.