Hopefully the gardeners among you will find some colourful patches in this Issue to make up for your spring gardens having produced nothing but their usual selection of slugs, moss, bindweed and unsavoury traces of next door's cat.
Here, among the succulent grandiflora of several of our regular hardy specimens, we have Peter Goulding face to face with Catholicism; Brian Allgar with an unusual site for an apple tree; Rob Stuart with what might be the only version of the Chilcot Report acceptable to Tony Blair; your Editor on the value of poetry as a soporific; Susan McLean on Poe's courtship preferences; Ed Shacklee with a heraldic beast; Jerome Betts with our first sighting of a curse in Dutch; et various al. –
while three tender, though hopefully hardy, varieties make their first appearances:--
Celia Merrill with pot-holes, Steve Diamond with paranoia and Douglas Hall without a dog bin.
PLEASE NOTE –
Those of you who feel that Lighten Up Online could do with a good digging-over and a richer variety of compost will be glad to hear that the September Issue will be guest-edited once again by Jerome Betts.
(Please do not re-submit any pieces already submitted as I shall be passing on to him all those which I already hold.)
And, for the icing on the cake ...
Melissa Balmain, winner of the Able Muse Book Award, has a full-length collection of her work appearing later this month. Walking in on People, published by Able Muse Press, can be ordered in advance direct from the Publishers and will also be available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and pretty well everywhere else on street or net. 102 pages of Melissa's work, with her sharp eye for subjects great and small and her ability for flawless craftsmanship, will surely be a real treat for all who believe that the best lighter poetry is frequently not as light as it may first appear.
See more on http://www.melissabalmain.com/walking-in-on-people-poems