Stephen Boyce was born in Surrey in 1950 and lives in Winchester. He studied French and philosophy and, following an early career as an actor and teacher, has worked for arts and heritage funding bodies for nearly thirty years.

He has been a prizewinner in a number of competitions including Kent & Sussex, Leicester, Ledbury, Ware Poets and the Plough Prize and has been published widely in magazines including Staple, The Interpreter’s House, Frogmore Papers, Smiths Knoll, Tears in the Fence, Links, the Southern Daily Echo, Moving Stories, and Acumen.

He has published a number of pamphlets including In the Northland – poems after the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson.

His full length collection, Desire Lines, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2010

His website is at www.stephenboycepoetry.co.uk

LENS

“What looks large from a distance, close up
ain’t never that big”. Bob Dylan

From here it looks as though she’s smiling
through those long feathered lashes.
It’s all in the eyes.

It seems she wants to tell me something,
wants me to remember how the sun
burned into the hill

irradiating us with its great glass eye,
and how next morning I found
its cool reflection

in that tiny concave lens, still slick,
spit-coated, floating on beads of dew,
a miniature coracle

with the curve of her smile.
From Desire Lines, published by Arrowhead Press