Welcome to the Mary Evans Poetry blog, launched on National Poetry Day 2015, where we invite poets to send us poems inspired by images from our collection. We're also including a few existing poems, both old and new, matched with one of our images. The poems and pictures chosen so far are listed below.

We're very grateful to a local creative writing group, the Nevada Street Poets, and especially one of their members, Lorraine Mariner, without whose guidance and enthusiasm this idea would not have got off the ground. We're delighted that Lorraine will continue to be involved as co-editor of this blog, alongside our staff member Gill Stoker.

To mark the second anniversary of Poems and Pictures, we held a poetry reading event in October 2017. You can read about it here.

We also celebrated the launch of a poetry book containing some of our pictures in April 2019, with poems specially written by Jane Clarke on a WW1 subject. More details here.

On 11 January 2021 we teamed up with Arts Destination South Molton (an arts organisation in North Devon) via Zoom to present an illustrated 'Kaleidoscope of Poetry', with readings by 15 of our blog poets: Jane Clarke, Martyn Crucefix, John Freeman, Vivien Freeman, Rebecca Gethin, Chris Hardy, Alison Hill, Robin Houghton, Rosie Jackson, Rosie Johnston, Derek Sellen, Jill Sharp, Janet Sutherland, Richard Westcott and Sarah Westcott. We had a large and enthusiastic audience, and hope to work with ADSM again in the future. You can hear the poems read by the poets and see the pictures which inspired them by clicking here.

You can click here to find our Poems and Pictures page on Facebook.

We hope you enjoy this addition to our website as much as we do. If you have any feedback, or would like to send us a poem inspired by one of our pictures, please contact Gill by email at gill.stoker@maryevans.com.