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Shaun Barr

@shaunbarr.bsky.social
3.1K followers 605 following 304 posts

Poet, photographer, gardener, Cumbria, UK. Longlisted National Poetry Competition 2025. The Manchester Review, Dream Catcher, The Frogmore Papers, The Madrid Review, Orbis. shaunbarrphotography.co.uk

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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
“From 7 until almost 13, I didn’t talk. I was persuaded to talk by a woman…who said, ‘Poetry is music written for the human voice. Until you read it (aloud) you will never love it’. That has influenced the way I hear poetry when I’m writing it; I write for the voice, not the eye.” Maya Angelou #poet
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John Glenday @johnglenday.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
northseapoets.substack.com/p/off-the-cu...
northseapoets.substack.com
Off the Cuff
John Glenday on Spontaneity and Revision
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This poem has never resonated more than now. Norman MacCaig on the irrational, nonsensical horror and beauty of this world. Whilst “reason sits helpless at its desk” #poetry #WritingCommunity
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
“I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces.”
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John Glenday @johnglenday.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Looking forward to coming through to Edinburgh for this Blue Diode reading - such a great lineup!
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Manchester Review @manchesterreview.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Dear readers, Please find the new Displacement issue of The Manchester Review below. Issues 29. www.themanchesterreview.co.uk We thank everyone who has contributed to the new edition. Best wishes, The Editors.
themanchesterreview.co.uk
Issue 29 'Displacement' - The Manchester Review
Image: © Charles Eastwood   Editorial Chris Newman, ‘Drought’ Katie Beswick, 2 poems Vicky Grut, ‘The Eid Dinner’ David Canning, ‘My Great Grandfather’s Apron Shop’ Mark Granier, ‘The Handover’ Uvini ...
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
And surely there's an elegance that comes of wishing not to learn from one's mistakes, repeating them time after time, with small variations, till something begins to form at the back of your mind: a possible world, an alternative reading of pain. From Homage To Cy Twombly, John Burnside #poetry
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Rae Radford @raeradford.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Please read..... #BookSky
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Attentiveness has never been more important, but with such distracted lives, arguably never less practised. Poets of course strive to improve their writing craft, but honing skills in noticing, that ‘act of resistance’ as Kathleen Jamie puts it, is where the poem really begins.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Perhaps this is poetry’s greatest gift: its unique ability to open doors between the known and the unknown, to allow us to slip into the liminal spaces we would otherwise never experience. #poetry #WritingCommunity
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” A quotation from William Blake.
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Carmella de Keyser @carmellapoetry.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
As a contributing poet I have caught a glimpse of September's Alien Buddha Zine and it is poised to be a collector's edition! Thrilled to have some new haibun within. Many thanks to Red for curating! #zinecommunity #printisnotdead #zinesandthings
The Alien Buddha's Astonishing Showcase
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Paul Bavister @paulbavister.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Thank you to the editors of Right Hand Pointing. Whaler is in issue 164. www.issues.righthandpointing.net/164 #poems #poem #poetry #blueskypoetry #poetrycommunity
Whaler
Whenever he thought I wasn’t tough enough,
he told the tale of when he took a ship
to the Antarctic whaling station,

then on his hundredth trip, chasing bowheads,
the ship beached and they were stuck
on a gravel bank. I never questioned the facts

when he said they were menaced
by polar bears until the rescue ship
could pick them up; I took it all as truth

when he said he ate the last great auk.
I tried my hardest to be like him,
but never quite lived the life

he never lived.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
This is sublime…
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Ian McMillan @imcmillan.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Pleased to announce that my new collection of poems, Red River Valley, is coming out from Carcanet Press in October. You can pre-order it from your local independent bookshop, ask your library to stock it, or take advantage of Waterstones giving a discount if you pre-order in the next 3 days.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
This particular summer, this feels more apt than ever.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
I was over the moon to find my poems accepted in Orbis, a journal with so much quality and kudos. But still beyond astounded to be chosen as their Featured Writer in the latest Summer issue. Never give up. Never let rejections cause you to doubt what you feel is true. #poetry #WritingCommunity
Front cover of Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal, #216, Summer 2026.
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The Madrid Review @madridlitmag.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
"The moment you start caring about what a gallery or a publisher thinks, you stop being an artist and become an employee." — Remedios Varo
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Why Bother? Because I guess most of us are driven to write poetry by instinct rather than reason we rarely ask the question. But on days when doubts flood in the answer here is exquisite. #poetry #WritingCommunity
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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
🚨Dream journal moment!🚨Beyond excited to have a poem in the new issue of North American Review alongside some absolutely rockstar poets and writers! Here’s to poetry, a little imagination, and the bizarre interplay of loss, lineage, and memory. @northamerreview.bsky.social
Glass Desk in the Hereafter

I made from my body a glass desk & from the glass desk, I made a wooden chair with mauve fabric. To my right, my brother's prayer card
resting against a framed black & white photograph of a dead dog. At my feet, another dog in her little brown bed breathing heavier
than she probably should. I sit more figuratively than I do literally.
I am sitting inside the paper doll-ness of my own girlhood. I am sitting inside
my mother & inside her mother & inside their teeth which are wider than their smiles. I am sitting inside my father & inside
my brother & when forced to move, I am walking inside the bones of a boy who died like a cliché in the bathroom. I am walking down the hall
& into the kitchen, into the microwave & into the coffee cup. & because my body is the space across which my entire life has unfolded, 1 am a thousand
ghosts that obscure my face in the mirror. I am rain in the hair, your tiny yellow rabbit, wildflowers at the side of the road. Sometimes,
I am a knife cutting through sky. Sometimes, I am carrying around the ball & chain of my own lousy architecture. Sometimes, my body grows
a separate body. I am the stray dog running loose on the interstate as well as God directing the oncoming traffic. Meaning, I am dodging
my own death while egging it on. Meaning, I am in the driver's seat, listening to Celine Dion & my brother is behind the wheel of every pick-up.
He is at the red light & the green light. He is parked at Dunkin' Donuts & just outside DeVito's coin laundry. Mostly, he is beside me with the windows
down, smelling of smoke. & because I am all body, I am breathing into the atmosphere & I am the atmosphere breathing. I am the glass desk & the mauve chair
& the brown bed & perhaps even the little white dog. & because the vast space of my body never changes, the poem is changing all the time.
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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Sylvia Plath
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Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?
If I could bleed, or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.
But colorless. Colorless.
20 July 1962
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
One of the most basic human experiences is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve in this non-stop, 24/7 connected world. All the more reason then to remember the value of solitude. #WritingCommunity
Jiddu Krishnamurti quotation on the value of solitude, stillness and silence.
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Daniel Hinds @danielghinds.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Thrilled to announce that I have won the UNESCO international Bridges of Struga Award for a debut poetry book from Struga Poetry Evenings for my collection New Famous Phrases published by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social. Thanks so much to all of the judges for their kind words about the book!
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The Madrid Review @madridlitmag.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
😍
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The Madrid Review @madridlitmag.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Out today! Get it from our website or Secret Kingdoms or @lib-parenthesis.bsky.social in Madrid or online at Peecho @worldoceanday.bsky.social @unep.org @unepwcmc.bsky.social #worldoceanday #publicationday
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Carmella de Keyser @carmellapoetry.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
The Madrid Review Issue 8 launches today! My poem Sea Glass Requiem is within & explores themes arising from #migration & #biculturalism. Also, I was thrilled to discover that Chasms my chapbook with @alienbuddhapress.bsky.social is a #RecommendedReads pick! Thank you @madridlitmag.bsky.social 🌊💙🌊
Sea Glass Requiem ©️ Carmella de Keyser 2026Chasms is a Recommended Reads pick in The Madrid Review.
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Miranda Keeling @mirandakeeling.com · 03/06/2026
Wow. The news is relentless. Exhausting. Devastating. Sometimes sharing my little observations feels like trying to grow a flower in a tornado. But these tiny acts matter. I’m sure of it. Every piece of art, or act of kindness by real humans, to and for each other, matters. More than ever.
Image by Penny Neville Lee of one of my observations: a little boy with a yellow coat and yellow stars and a moon. Words are: "Me (to a little boy beside me in a cafe who is wearing a yellow coat): Nice coat. Little boy: Thank you. It means when night comes I can hide as a star."
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Helen Day @lbflyawayhome.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
The modern world in old Ladybird. "The blacksmith's trade is an old one which does not change" (1954) Artist: Septimus Scott
Here we see the blacksmith performing the role of a farrier and inspecting the hoof of a large working farm horse as two children look on fascinated
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
The bogs, rivers, mountains, and shorelines are more than preservers of old myths, bones, and memories. They are energy banks and time sponges, and what is held within them seeks release. Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us #photography #writing
Landscape photography. Cullin mountain range, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Snow-capped peaks with golden grasses in foreground.
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The Madrid Review @madridlitmag.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
We're lucky to have it and you in the issue @carmellapoetry.bsky.social ❤️
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James Mcconachie @jamesmcconachie1.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
That time of year. This sweaty thing, first published in @madridlitmag.bsky.social
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
So thrilled to be a part of this.
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barbisblue @barbisblue.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation."

--Walter Cronkite

The Retired School Librarian.com
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Kathryn Gray @kathryngray.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
I’m reading online for the Transatlantic Poetry Series on 19 June at 7pm GMT. Tickets—free—available at the link to book. Would be lovely if you’d like to join me for poems on Hollywood, musicians, poets, desire, memory, and the middle life. ❤️
ticketsource.com
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
‘Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time,’ Ada Limón attempting to stay just beyond the feeling of despair that increasingly threatens to engulf us all. #poetry #WritingCommunity
The Leash, a poem by Ada Limón.
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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Anna Akhmatova, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer
If everyone in the world
Who has asked me for emotional help,
All the holy fools and the mutes,
The cripples and discarded wives,
The convicts and the suicides
Would send me a kopek apiece —
I would be richer than all of Egypt,
As the late Kuzmin used to say.
But they didn’t send me kopeks,
Instead, they shared their strength with me.
And I became the strongest one in the world,
So that even this is not difficult for me.

1960
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
“When you are a poet as he was, you have no confusions, you write / The words you are given to, you are possessed or protected by a vision.”
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Carmella de Keyser @carmellapoetry.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Thrilled to be on the BBC this Thurs 21/05 & Sat 23/05. A special thank you to Beth Linnell for selecting my poetry. I am reading a poem first published by Paul Short within his #UnwhisperedLegacy anthology where he raised over £300 for Médecins Sans Frontières.🕊️ #bbcessex #poemsforthesoul #voices
Carmella de Keyser reading on the BBC Rob Jellie Show-Beth Linnell sits in.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
A sliver of sanity on Sunday (before the News).
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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Detecting notes of Frank Bidart's "Herbert White" in this unsettling poem by Ada Limón
OVERPASS

The road wasn't as hazardous then, 
when I'd walk to the steel guardrail, 
lean my bendy girl body over, and stare 
at the cold creek water. In a wet spring, 
the water'd run clear and high, minnows 
mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad 
shadowed by the shore's long reeds. 
I could stare for hours, something 
always new in each watery wedge —
a bottle top, a man's black boot, a toad. 
Once, a raccoon's carcass half under 
the overpass, half out, slowly decayed 
over months. I'd check on him each day, 
watching until the white bones of his hand 
were totally skinless and seemed to reach 
out toward the sun as it hit the water, 
showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers 
still clinging. I don't think I worshipped 
him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence 
of him, how it felt like a job to daily 
take note of his shifting into the sand.

                                                         —Ada Limón
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Paul Connolly @thepaulconnolly.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Looking forward Beth Osmond’s Hatchery launch tonight👇Beth’s poetry is highly original, fusing the emotional and technical considerations of the neonatal environment to produce work that, while rooted in her immediate experience, moves towards more universal reflections on the fragility of existence
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
“One day, all we guard will be surrendered. “ Li-young Lee, on learning to accept and embrace the fragility and temporality of life, in his poem: To Hold #poetry #WritingCommunity
To Hold, a poem by Li-young Lee, on the fragility of life and the preciousness of love.
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Joseph Lewczak (Truth Seeker) @truthseeker59.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
This artwork is "Harmony in Blue-Orange" by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, created in 1923.
This artwork is Harmony in Blue = Orange (Harmonie blau=orange), a famous abstract masterpiece painted by the Swiss-German modernist artist Paul Klee in 1923.
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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
loving-others-to-death— Michael Ryan
REMINDER


Torment by appetite
is itself an appetite
dulled by inarticulate,
dogged, daily

loving-others-to-death—
as Chekhov put it, “compassion down to your fingertips”—
looking on them as into the sun

not in the least for their sake
but slowly for your own
because it causes
the blinded soul to bloom

like deliciousness in dirt,
like beauty from hurt,
their light—their light—
pulls so surely. Let it.
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Shaun Barr @shaunbarr.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
“love is, always, the flight back to where we are.” A poet who has left us so much. J. H. Prynne, 24 June 1936 - 22 June 2026
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Brian Groom @groomb.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Rain, Portland Street crossing Oxford Road, Manchester, painting by Rob Pointon.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.
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Guy Shrubsole @guyshrubsole.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
The @nationaltrust.org.uk only rarely ask their members to take political action, but when they do, it’s seismic. Please take the NT’s action, email your MP demanding the Government protect 30% of the UK for nature by 2030: campaigns.nationaltrust.org.uk/page/186395/... bsky.app/profile/nati...
campaigns.nationaltrust.org.uk
Nature = Future
Please share this important action
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Rough Diamond Poetry @rough-diamond1.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Our latest anthology has the most beautifully relevant and hard hitting poetry today ✊💎 www.amazon.co.uk/Poems-Protes...
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Lev Parikian @levparikian.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
It begins
Screenshot of a bird sighting: Common Swift
Apus apus
Location Portland, Dorset
Seen today  09:42
one flew in off the sea at the Bill mid-morning
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