Sean Swallow (he/him) is a poet and garden designer with a lifelong connection to the Welsh landscape.

Exploring nature through a queer lens, his work hopes to subvert the pastoral tradition, offering escape and introspection.

Drawing from personal experiences as an Englishman in rural Wales, his poetry navigates themes of identity and belonging.

Bio

Whilst studying for an English Literature BA (hons) at The University of Liverpool I became interested in the overlap between queer poets and the twentieth century North American pastoral.

I read Frank O’Hara’s Homosexuality, ‘It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate’.

And of gay men cruising he wrote, ‘The good love a park / and the inept a railway station’.

How can locations serve as a code? And how could he write with the authority of ‘law’?

These are questions I still ask myself in my work.

I became a garden designer in my late twenties and, over a period of several years, my landscape work quite regularly appeared in the national press.

I developed my own garden style which attempted to ‘seem natural’, a style which later became important to me as a poet, even when experimenting with form.

Preoccupied by gardens as places of wildlife habitat, I planted hedgerows, woodlands and encouraged hay meadows.

Many of the plants and animals I engaged with featured in poems I wrote later.

In 2014, I studied Poetry and Form with the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. I rediscovered the creative constraints of poetic form, how form prevents us from writing exactly what we want and, in doing so, makes us write something unexpected.

In 2019 I gained a Creative Writing MA (with Distinction) from The Open University.