Poet, author

Sally Festing’s poetry has followed ten years of journalism, radio plays, academic studies, Penguin biographies of Gertrude Jekyll, Barbara Hepworth and varied non-fiction books. She has won prizes and featured in more than 40 different print and online magazines:

Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Assent, Critical Quarterly, Coffee House, Dream Catcher, Envoi, Equinox, Fenland Poetry Journal, Frogmore, Ghost Furniture Catalogue, Ink Sweat and Tears, Interpreter's House, Iota, London Grip, Links, LUPO, Magma, MaryEvans website. New Welsh Review, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, Outposts, The New Statesman, The Poets’ Republic, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Seam, The Shop, Smith's Knoll, SMOKE, Snakeskin, The Spectator, Stand, Staple, The Times, Under the Radar, The Wolf, Wild Court, Wordplay, “14”.

Her latest collection, Meeting Places (Mica Press, 2025) has a thoughtful new review. Anton Johae notes how the book’s cover (‘a bather stepping into curvy white waves makes a welcoming start.’) The place is primarily the North Norfolk coast, ‘immediately apparent in ‘Echoes’.

     I remember early morning, dawn coming up
     under dusky skies, beachcombing, foraging for wood
     when marram stripped my leg and stung

Moniza Alvi said ‘I enjoyed the vibrancy of the poems, their alertness and their stylistic variety’.

Paul Muldoon chose the opening poem ‘The Swim’, as a winner in the Open category in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition 2024.

Sally has another full collection and five pamphlets thanks to Oversteps Books, Happenstance and Fair Acre Press and KFS.

Font is a tribute to the Norman font in St Mary’s Church, Burnham Deepdale.

Recently featured work includes:

Order now!
Meeting Places
£10.00
Meeting Places, Sally Festing
Paperback
978-1-869848-41-5
229 x 152 mm 70 pp. 20 May 2025
Available on back-order

Navel

Vitruvius fits man in a circle and a square,
Leonardo shows how this was done.
You could swing me on my navel
like Catherine wheels our father spun
on Guy Fawkes night. I waved a sparkler
orbiting the world inside my mind.

An umbilical cord is compass point,
bull’s eye, propeller’s spin. A way in
I thought, proud mine wasn’t the button kind.
I’d settle for the knotty hollow, pinned
when I was born. The space could be
a lair for all I might become.

from Obsessed with Pipework

Feeder

Sharpening geriatric eyes
he focuses binoculars through the glass

on the feeder dangling a dream-filled stocking
with hearts of sunflower seed.

Each blackbird has its own technique.
Their babies so big and still being fed.

Has the goldfinch gone?
Keep still, it’ll come again.

Tits plan their picnic – they trap seed beneath a foot,
swallow bits into their crop and return to the nest to share.

Robins, finches, swing the swaying cylinder.
It’s where trajectories begin.

Look! a male starling. Online, it says they’re smart.
He laughs. Starlings get more than what’s fair.

A squall of wings, the feeder swings.
They hold fast. Such parenting!

from Obsessed with Pipework