Welcome. I’m John Looker. Well, that is the pen name for my poetry – see ‘More about the writer’ below.
My poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in Britain, the USA, New Zealand, Australia and India. Individual poems have been Highly Commended by Daljit Nagra judging the Edward Thomas Prize and by New Zealand’s Cilla McQueen in the Caselberg International Prize. Other poems appeared in the Austin International Poetry Festival’s 20th anniversary anthology. Three collections have been published by the independent press Bennison Books.
Having written and read poetry absentmindedly throughout my life, in retirement I have had time to get on with it single-mindedly .
Some tasters
There’s an awful lot of poetry on offer online. If you are curious about mine, here are a few samples.
My collection Shimmering Horizons (Bennison Books, 2021, published through Amazon) was laid out with six half-sonnets as milestones along the way. The last, which is something of a personal motto, was this:
At the sixth milestone
We hoped at first that we could travel light:
a decent cloak, a staff, a hat of fur –
for we were young and light of heart and bold.
But on the way the backpack seemed to expand
with souvenirs and contraband, with gold
of course and IOUs, letters of love
and talismans – and finally this myrrh.
Daljit Nagra selected my poem The Night of the Land Crabs as Highly Commended when judging the Edward Thomas Prize for 2026. It can be read here on this blog at https://johnlooker.wordpress.com/2026/01/07/the-night-of-the-land-crabs/ . The poem begins:
From The Night of the Land Crabs
It’s strange to be here, here where tropical night
has swooped like a bird of prey, here where night
is sweaty and loud; we've strayed beyond the hotel
with its lounges and air-conditioning, its sterile smells,
to the baited trap of twisting streets
Another poem, Conversation with a Sea Lion, was Highly Commended by Cilla McQueen in New Zealand’s Caselberg Trust’s International Competition and later published in their anthology ‘no time to lollygag’. It included these lines:
From Conversation with a Sea Lion
It’s more to do with the sense of being, underneath it all, alone.
Beneath the bustle of work and the ceaseless interaction of family life
there’s a certain stillness,
there’s a layer of deep undisturbable quiet:
a solitude like your own.
You can read the full poem here: https://johnlooker.wordpress.com/2023/08/21/conversation-with-a-sea-lion-4/
I was invited to contribute to the commemorative anthology of the Texas International Poetry Festival’s 20th anniversary. One of my poems was First Landfall in Nova Scotia which begins:
From First Landfall in Nova Scotia
This was no earthly paradise
they must have thought grimly,
pressing against the gunwale in their unwashed clothes,
lifting the smaller children
to get a better view … …
You can read the poem here: https://johnlooker.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/first-landfall-in-nova-scotia/
Publications
Three collections have been published by Bennison Books:
The Human Hive (2015) which looks at life through work with poems featuring human activity and emotion down the ages and round the globe;
Poems for my Family (2019) – this being primarily a personal collection for my family; and a third:
Shimmering Horizons, August 2021, with the theme of the journey, the quest, the odyssey.
You can see a selection of poems from the books on other pages of this website. The books themselves can be bought through Amazon and some retailers – modestly priced at or near cost.
More about the writer
This site began in 2009 as a place to share my own poems. At first I wrote under my own name (John Stevens) but later adopted the pen name of John Looker – that was partly to avoid confusion with other writers, but principally to honour my mother and her father, John Looker, after whom I had been named and who had left us an impressive collection of books on English literature, folk stories from around the world, religion and philosophy that I read avidly as a child.
My wife and I live in south east England and we have close family both here in the UK and in Dunedin, New Zealand, where we have been welcomed us many times.
Poetry from John Looker 