Author: Gerald Cox
Date: 08/11/20

New contemporary poet Amanda Hodgson added to Listen to Poetry

Listen to Poetry would like to introduce a new contemporary poet Amanda Hodgson and welcome her to the website. We have enjoyed working with her and appreciate her willingness to appear on the site. Her poems are well observed and insightful and take everyday situations and relationships creating atmosphere and meaning. She touches and describes experiences we have all had. She also explores collective anxieties such as climate change something that, whether we like it or not, we are all effected by. Her poem ‘I Dream of a Tidal Wave’ is a good example:-

Rhizomes creak, I hear them
The creaks may be the back of Atlas
He’s feeling his eternity, the world has driven him down
Always a weight, it is too much now
Grey with trash and smog and hubris
Lumpy old giant carpet world, not large enough
For all we sweep under it
The moment hovers, like a dragonfly over water
The lights of a million billion small screens
Our precious fireflies
Flicker and go out
Then the water, the raging torrent
Covers everything, everything
Then it is over
The end

We wish Amanda every success and look forward to future work from her.

Amanda in her own words:-

‘I’ve always loved poetry. I feel it is a medium that encourages playing with language like no other. Words in poetic form have an instant, sometimes physical impact on me. 

I wrote pretty, teacher-pleasing verse from an early age. This morphed into the inevitable self-pitying adolescent horrors, long since destroyed. My poems now are from memory and observation. I like that everyone sees things differently, yet an image painted with words can be so evocative that it feels as if it is recognized in the heart.

I get a real kick out of expressing myself in poetic language and am delighted when anyone else likes what I do. Being included here is a great honor and has encouraged me to give more time to writing poems. I recently finished my third collection of short fiction and wish to build up a collection of poetry for publication.

I enjoy the poems of Jon Silkin, Sylvia Plath, T.S .Eliot, Louis MacNeice, Rilke, Djuna Barnes and Hollie McNish.’