New publication, written with Ashley Burgoyne, whose other work can seen on his website (https://ashleyburgoyne.wixsite.com/writerandcomposer).

The book is available from Amazon, and it is a beautiful and unusual journey through life. It begins with birth, progresses through life, and after a winter of loss ends with a moment of hope. Here are some poems from the 'Love and Work' section of the book, mine first, then Ashley's...

The Madonna of the Peninsula

I draw up the sea’s whiteness, like litmus.
Its brilliance outstares me. Tidelessly, its
flat face beats back the hammer blows
of relentless midday that press flat

the seared land. Arctic water, homeopathically

dilute, recedes to another shore that spewed
out our dull grey sand. The scurf is shorn off
by weighted men under wicker creels.

The man who lights my candles has eyes

steel-hard that the light rings soundlessly off.
My heart sings in its white carapace for him,
for him. I am a beacon for the ships at sea

and the hopeless insomniac walkers who
stalk the cliffs, becoming weightless, as
the dull brass plaques are shined to the sun’s
brightness; its deadened saltpan stare.

The Thing With Work

 The thing with work

Is it can hurt

The body,

The mind,

The soul.

 It’s supposed to help you

Achieve a goal.

Instead it leaves

Some kind of hole

 Where love was

Is now lost.

The price of earning

Comes at a cost.

Balance,

Where family comes first,

Is gone.

When people thirst

 For more than they need.

Evidence of this,

Proof of that.

An unending greed.

 Some say

Life’s a beach.

Not if

You decide to teach.

'Found' poems

A series of 'found' poems composed using an app that scrambles Facebook posts. I have taken the everyday things that I say and created a new space for them to exist in. I've found this interesting as an exercise in using social media as a tool in what is still seen as a more traditional art form. And to see which words I use a lot. There is plenty of love, sea and weather here....

When we are speaking

Your mouth mirrors the light,
Like rain and soft twilights.

This day cannot stand the constant
Howlings of wind. Nor can the trees,
Or urgent love.

I am more used to my sadness than you are.

The night brings another rose
And eyes the colour of pines.

                        *****

You meet the weather coming the other way.
I suffer the air.

It is more than love; this fiery kiss,
This animal sunset.

Your stark pupils tell of the hawk’s violence,
The hare’s blood. The bones at the strandline.

                        *****

Sea; let me stop now:
The solitude, and this weather.
I’ve begged to be too much better
Than I seemed; dangerously.

Only the hopeless prayers are left.
You balance your lashes, trying
And failing, to leave everything behind.
Mostly rooks in your shut mouth.

I watch as my words become strained
At your pace. Our rendition of love,
Vast and grey, yearns silently over the house.
You are choral; gregarious at the least.

This more than qualifies me your sweetness.

                        *****

You come now and then
Bringing your face before you.
I eat what little you give me.
My smallness grows.

In the woods, where we settle,
Nobody knows us.
We play at love.

Foxes gnaw at my grown nails.

                        *****

I will know tomorrow if it has been too long.
Hunger makes me sharp; it is my version of wildness.

The moon keeps the men in her wake
From their feral yowlings.

My meanings are blurred.

Yours are more pure.

Your eyes are fine, like mist and clarity.

I eat from them gladly.

                        *****

I love with the punctuality of a rainstorm,

Watching your eye’s dismay. Oh, but the song
On the sunny beach, made up as you walked
By the rims of anguish. Thinking
I’d go into an endless ecstasy for your boozing stride.

I wait to explain to his face in a photograph.

The others stand still around. I’d hold all the sea;
A snake coiled in the history of forever.
Love – the lungs stretch their intricate wings.

Memories of the evening;
The weft of my lifelong ailment,
The length of our lightening.
A wind still still hauls on them

Held in by the blackbirds.

                        *****

Today I leave the house for the others.
Lovely things tear my eyes,
But they bleed through the weather – through the sea.

I love the eyes of these stubborn hedges –
No more yours.
What kind of green blood
Swam to your good wishes?

Word and image...a new take on Little Red Cap. I've often reworked fairytale images -- and I like to twist them a little. This is a word and image piece I made for an exhibition at the Nicholson Gallery, Holt, Norfolk.

New publication

Delighted to have another poem published in the poetry webzine Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Woven In

 

i.
Once my head was off
a new house was needed,
as though the stones had blood
so soaked into their porous,
gritty hearts that no water
could wash them clean.

 

The pond fills slowly;

it rains so rarely. The weed
waits, with the one shark-eyed
pike in the shallows. Men
build slowly, stone by stone,
until the roof shines in its

 

dull, red brilliance;

fakey turrets crowing in
fat glory over the dry moat.
They are a bold bunch.
The wainscotting is shined
to a rich red sheen.

 

ii.
In another country women stitch,
between sharp white wings,
at raw canvas; threads coloured
with saffron, spinach, beetles’ blood
shape face after face.
I get myself in there, somehow,

with some  sleight of hand.
They said I was a witch.
At night I step down, taking with me
my newly stitched head that is wiser
than my old one. Corporeally,
I walk their halls, feet ringing.

Continuing the archive...

Published in Ambit 175, selected by Henry Graham and Julia Casterton (2004)

Joan of Arc

i
They begin;
small whispers that round my ears.
See: I am doing it myself,
turning in my vision,
turning it in to the mad orbit of days.
They begin, with their sleight of hand,
thrusting me into tight corners of space.
I cannot be alone with these things,
these thoughts that spill into each musty corner.

I am silent and unmistakably sheened,
with my mouth lapsed open.
They speak, in vast curls of roundness,
in mixed lyricism.
My ears are buzzing with the feel of them
and the ache of the flames crawling higher.
They are oozing through the cracks in my door,
their oily presence.

And so I cut off all my hair
and fit myself for battle,
naked and glowing beneath
the looped casings of my armour.
No longer silent I am speaking in tongues,
loosing my mouth with good wine
like the soldiers do.
I spiral higher; let battle commence.

ii
They gather the dead rushes into crude bundles,
tying the ends with hair and spun thread.
The pyres are built with care, the songs
of the builders drifting over to where
I kneel in my shift; more girl than warrior.
My eyes are raised to my own sacrifice
as they douse the pyres with oils and perfumes.
The mouths of the priests are wet with mead.
My own starved lips mouth my endings.

They lift me like a prize, these glazed men,
and call upon their faiths to carry me away
on their burning fronds; their conscience.
The flames lick my thighs. My own scent hangs
and cloys and it scares me, oh it scares me
when I see how men fall and flay themselves
at my feet like penitent saints or cracked gods.

Continuing the archive...

Published in Ambit 175, selected by Henry Graham and Julia Casterton (2004)


Rapunzel

From my tower I can see
the tops of the far trees.
I can see them coming,
one by one,
these half-dead men.
Curiosity fires my blood
and I burn like a beacon
in my high room.

Sometimes they come in twos
and lie in wait,
avoiding each others eyes.
Rapunzel, they say,
let down your hair.
And so I do.
I do as my senses bid.

My charmed locks fall,
grazing their faces and they climb.
Each one more trusting than the last;
each one more sure.
My daring grows,
drawing them in
with octopus feelers.

Continuing the archive

Anthology entry selected by Hilary Mellon, 2005


Curlew Cry

The cry of the curlew, where
sea rises faster than a man can walk.
Fog laps the damp, the suck
of salt-fattened mud
on boots and dogs and sea birds.

Dogs seem to surf the marsh,
while men walk their
leaden-footed oily gait in mud
that will embalm them to leather.
Mud swallows men whole.

Wrecked boats settle with
the lowering tides as the wind
clanks through the masts; plovers
whistle from the beds of thrift.
This is the time for skeletons of ships
and bones of men to wash up.


Anthology selection by George Szirtes, 2006


Porthmeor

From our gull-harassed house
we can almost see Newfoundland.
Across the whole half-globe
of ice-green Atlantic, whales
nose the deep soundings.

Your sonar, quick dull thuds,
echoes across the depths.
You are as unknown and unseen
as the frosted wastes of the Arctic,
as the North Atlantic Drift

and yet we search horizons
through sea mist and spray.
Nightly, your eddies swirl,
mercury-thick against the
granite full stop of the cliffs.


Anthology selection by Doris Corti, 2008

Harvest Moon

A ship slices the sea from the horizon,
cleanly. This pebble-clacking foreshore
sings in ochres, umbers, straw-wet
sloughed-off layers as dusk falls.

Blackbirds throw their vibratos from
branch to roof and back again
as sky deepens to blood-red over
the sandspit land and cracked wooden hulls.

A salt smell is everywhere. Dew falls
on skin. Silence, then the ripe moon
is neon-bright and low-slung in
the ink-bled, early frosted night.

Anthology selection by Keith Chandler, 2009

Seals

Out there, where the sea trembles like mercury
under the cooling violet of the dusk sky,
seals raise their boulder-shiny heads
and doggy-paddle, cutting a thin wake
through the smooth water.

On the clacking hillock of flints
our unsure feet meet the body of a seal,
eyeless, where the gulls have been at him.
Fur salt-thickened and stuck in stiff folds.
Leathery hands clasp the pebbles.

Near him is the perfect skeleton of a fish;
the memory of the chase, and now
the sea wants him back. Next high tide
he will be keel-hauled with fish; picked clean.
Sleek silhouette rolled to coral.