James Nash, 2020 Competition Adjudicator,
"What Am I Looking For?"
James Nash is a writer, journalist and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds and Bridlington, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines [Enitharmon Press 2007] among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe.‘Some Things Matter’, and ‘Cinema Stories’ were published by Valley Press in 2012 and 2915.
He edited the Candlestick Press pamphlet ‘Fourteen Festive Sonnets’ in 2017. His most recent collection ‘A Bench for Billie Holiday: Seventy Sonnets’ was published in October 2018.
'I want poems that make me tingle with their wit and nerve and beauty, that find the words for our inner lives and for the world outside us. Give me poetic stories that tell 'a truth’ if not always ‘the truth’, and season them with language that catches my breath and heart.'
He edited the Candlestick Press pamphlet ‘Fourteen Festive Sonnets’ in 2017. His most recent collection ‘A Bench for Billie Holiday: Seventy Sonnets’ was published in October 2018.
'I want poems that make me tingle with their wit and nerve and beauty, that find the words for our inner lives and for the world outside us. Give me poetic stories that tell 'a truth’ if not always ‘the truth’, and season them with language that catches my breath and heart.'
