Ben Ridley-Jones

Ben Ridley-Jones (b.1993) spent much of his childhood in the Suffolk countryside with his family which has roots stretching back centuries in the county. He read History at Cambridge before embarking on a career of public service working to address the housing and homelessness crisis in England. For many years a reader of as much poetry as he could get his hands on, Ben has recently started writing some poems of his own and is determined to hone his craft with the hope of publication in the future.

While recovering from an injury back in Suffolk, he wrote six poems addressing his experience of overcoming trauma, the relationship between language and landscapes and in response to his oldest friend, Joshua Raz’s painting. These were printed together with Josh’s poems in a pamphlet Glass is Sand, which accompanies Josh’s show ‘Mistaken Shores’ at the Ronchini Gallery in London.

Lapis l’azzuri


Long gone, now, seem voices that we heard:
To live with untrammelled joy
To drop hollows, lope up hills
To say with open mind and wish
To gazelle antique sills

A circular argument -
can you hear scales, sliding?
Better to hear at intervals
than by pitching clatter. 

I compress and call out plumbless depths
I swim from reef to reef
I sound out in a gannet’s weft
and count the bars I see are left
I relish in a sea of stars

Is it connexion to deeper past lives?
Extension of a later cast?

Make of this as you will, tho’
Long dead I see them, stilled. 

Do we in a temperate sea break out our muddy mould?
Do we rise from green to white and find a marine hue?