Seam provides a platform for established and emerging poets to experiment with form and concept. Seam also features reviews, interviews and essays.

Founded in 1994 by David Lightfoot and Robert Etty, Seam began as an A6 stapled magazine. In Seam 21 David Lightfoot describes how the magazine got its name:

We wanted a new, monosyllabic title that suggested both the idea of something valuable deposited (by poets) to be mined (by readers), and poetry that makes readers look at life afresh by making connections between two surfaces, interfaces or areas of experience (the past and the present, the living and the dead, man and woman, people and places, etc.) An hour's brainstorming in Robert's kitchen gave us three possibilities: Pyx, Box, Seam.

Pyx was my first choice but Robert, correctly as usual, persuaded me that it was too ecclesiastical. Still keen on the idea of a container that had to be opened with some sense of anticipation, we settled on Box, while still liking Seam for its undertones both of mining and linked surfaces. I drove home satisfied but with a bit of grit in the oyster of my subconscious. At three o'clock in the morning I woke up, and unable to get back to sleep, went to make myself a mug of tea. As the kettle came to the boil, I remembered that box is American slang for vagina.

Next morning we decided to call it Seam.

Seam transferred to the more conventional A5 format in 2000.


The editors are

Anne Berkeley
Anne is a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of Six. Widely published in magazines, she has won prizes in many competitions, including Arvon, Times Literary Supplement, Kent & Sussex, Tabla. A pamphlet The buoyancy aid and other poems was published by Flarestack in 1997. Nine poems are featured in OxfordPoets 2002 (Carcanet Press). Anne was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2004. She edited Rebecca Elson's posthumous collection of poetry A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet, 2001).
See also her pages at poetry pf

Frank Dullaghan Consulting Editor
Frank has been involved with Seam since 2000 and was sole editor from 2003 until 2006. He has had work published in many magazines, including Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, London Magazine, The Shop (Ireland) and online in nthposition.com. He is a member of the British Haiku Society and has been published in Haiku Quarterly and The Iron Book of British Haiku. He has an MA (Distinction) in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan. His new collection, On the Back of the Wind is due from Cinnamon Press in 2008.