Below are a few poems from Red Gloves (2020) and The Met Office Advises Caution (2016).
Links to more poems and other publications can be found here.
Links to more poems and other publications can be found here.
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The Desire Path
Now I go back I notice the jagged fallen trees and the new twigs I’d thought of as budding bobbled with disease and the birches’ unfocused eyes and the scattering of feathers like a planned demolition. The river curls round on itself. Someone has knotted a scraggy red ribbon to a stick. Soon the sleepy adder will stir under her quilt and I am afraid and ill-equipped to wade the few metres that divide me from the far bank where spring is. |
Red Gloves
The women are carrying the coffin. Under the fear of slippage they make slow steps. We cannot say that they advance. More than one woman is weathering – from the cool top of her head to her strained fingers to her toes pushed together in interview shoes – the urge, like a rip tide, to run backwards and away. Today is not a normal day. How awkward we are. Even were they to confer it would not be possible for these four women to set down their load with elegance. The military could manage it – but military is system, control from above. The women are moving from within. More than one will go to ground today. More than one will be tugged otherwards. Husbands and children. How requiring, how embarrassable we are. One is wearing red woollen gloves. She is pressing them to the wicker as though without her hands’ small force the entire construction would fold. |
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The Studio
little lady little man little pot little pan little table little chair little cupboard little stair little plant little leaves little rooftop little eaves little cake little pie little naptime lullaby little blanket little book little corner little nook little cushion little frame little thing without a name little statue little bell little bauble little shell little lamp little pin little box to put it in little apron little jug little window little rug little postcard little rock little candle little clock little broom little door little greedy wanting more |
When all this is over
I mean to run fast where the buzz of machines and the humdrum of walls and the flummox of words are behind me where no one not even myself observes me oh yes I intend to run in the dark where the thud of the feet eclipses the thud of the heart where a chill night bites me and a slick sweat coats me and streetlamps gild me and church bells ring me |
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Turning
Now it’s autumn and another year in which I could leave you is a slowly sinking ship. The air has developed edges and I am preparing to let myself lie in a curtained apartment, safe in the knowledge that strangers have ceased to gather and laugh in the lane below and the brazen meadow no longer presumes to press its face to the window like an inquisitor. Soon even the river will evince a thicker skin, my breath each morning will flower white, and all of summer’s schemes will fly like cuckoos. The leaves are turning and the trees are shaking them off. Bonfire smoke between us like a promise lingers. |
Visitor
I find myself standing in the garden among familiars: pink and yellow roses; an anniversary birdbath now wrapped in moss; the stone-grey football that soaks up water and wheezes like an old man. On the ridged path loose soil shifts between my toes. I reach over the back fence, unbolt the gate, sidestep the fat blackcurrant bush and weave through avenues of runner beans. In the heat of the greenhouse, time breathes slowly, the air heavy as tomatoes; the same air that hung about your hands. I make an inventory: cracked flowerpots; radio components awaiting reincarnation; spilt seeds still clinging to dreams of geraniums. I close the door. The sun stays inside, dozing. In the shade of the laburnum your collection of rain is brimming again. I deliver it. It keeps returning. |
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Carpe Diem
Surprised by the underside of a snail – a beige highlight on an otherwise black window – I went to the next room for paper and a pen. I would have sat for hours in the dark distilling words from it; studying the plasticine slur, the way it stuck there as though on purpose, to rescue the evening from monotony. Before I got back the snail moved on leaving the window vacant, a frame to hang a poem on. |
The Met Office Advises Caution
While the river turns up its collar and hurries along, gulls line up to submit to the weather. One jump and air possesses them, bodies and wings helpless as handkerchiefs snatched from windows of trains intent on the coast. Each bird is flaunted against the sky, a warning to any cyclist still clinging on. Branches lash out; old trees lie down and don’t get up. A wheelie bin crosses the road without looking, lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling its knowledge. |
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The Molecatcher’s Warning
Nobody asked or answered questions out there. Ten miles from the nearest anywhere the landscape was a disbanded library. Only the moles remained, strung on a barbed wire fence, a dozen antiquated books forced open. It must’ve been the north-east wind or a bandit crow that picked them over so – not a scrap hanging on inside the stretched skins, their spines disintegrating. Read in me they wanted to declare how it all ends. But the threads that once had a hold on their hearts dangled, loose and crisp. And their kin can’t read anything but earth. |
The Hare
Washed clean at the end by twenty hours of serious rain, the remains of a hare are sticking to the road in front of my house. With all the dart of it knocked out there isn’t much left to consider: a stream of southbound traffic has planed tawny scruff to flat grey. What mattered were the moments before the sky let go, which followed its last dash and the squeal that brought me to the window, where I saw it laid up on the tarmac like a hot baby in the act of waking, coming round to the sense of a mother somewhere, to justify its reaching, its mouth closing and opening, shaping a soundless cry to the morning and its big black eyes gaping as though looking for an exit. |
