Corinne lives in the South Manchester area of the UK. A specialist teacher of Speech and Drama for over thirty years, Corinne started writing seriously in 2010. Her first placing was as a runner-up in a Writers’ Forum monthly competition and subsequently her work appeared on the Visual Verse website. She enjoys poetry writing courses, and is currently being mentored by Jim Bennett. She is also a long term member of a local writing group. Corinne has had poems published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in Reach Poetry, which also published ‘For The Silent’ and ‘Voices For the Silent –anthologies published in conjunction with The League Against Cruel Sports. Corinne is also a ‘Poetry Kit’ poet as from 2020.

Several of Corinne’s poems have been reviewed in Writers’ Forum and Writing Magazine, and she has won, been placed and short listed in a number of competitions in both of these publications, and several times in Reach Poetry’s ‘Box’ for the most popular poem/s of any given month . Corinne enjoys writing both formal and free verse and is especially fond of ekphrastic poetry.

Toast

'We're toast', he said. 
I look up from my weeding, arrested
by the sound of fear in his voice. 

Two teenage boys, stopping 
outside my house, pore 
over a message on a mobile phone. 

Sad to think that a word synonymous
with comfort should have morphed
into meaning threat and aggression,  
and its harmonious homonym,
the celebratory 'toast', given overtones 
of martyrdom and genocide.

Lady Macbeth at the Knit and Natter Club

(The Village Hall, Ennytown)
 
Long black robe, dishevelled hair, 
footprints glutinous, tacky – 
Here's the smell of blood still. 
 
The room darkens, chatter ceases.
We put aside our knitting,
stash cherished bootees away
in the deepest recesses 
of our craft bags. 
 
We look at one another, whisper,
'What is she doing here?'
She makes for the rostrum, 
points at you – at me –
her fingers dripping blood. 
 
Was the hope drunk wherein 
you dressed yourselves? hath 
it slept since, to look so green 
and pale at what it did so freely? 
 
Her voice reaches each cowering corner
of the room. Our innards freeze. 
Afraid of her Medusa stare, we bury 
our faces in our balls of wool, shiver 
beneath the malevolent shadow 
that envelops us all. 

On Michelangelo’s ‘Pietà

(Seen in St Peter's Basilica, Rome)
 
Alone in stark simplicity,
no one by to venerate
or celestial forms to elevate
 their undisguised humility, 
she holds him tight, this full grown man –
her child. Her tender grief’s restrained, 
accepting what had been ordained
from birth, in God’s eternal plan.
 
But the sculptor’s grave affinity
makes a statement so profound
for suffering humanity,
that even Golgotha’s grim mound
is charged with its own divinity, 
still courageously earthbound.