Poems from Poetry Birmingham, Bad Lilies, Under the Radar, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court, etc.
The trilogy of Self, voice/sounds and the written word appear in several of the poems, especially at endings. Sometimes it is Nature's voice (rather than a human's) that appears from a void -
-
Then, as the river turned to flow, it was real
and what the broken water said, I heard.
It rose, as if a wish had kept its word,
to breathe the earth - submerged, and let the river heal. (p.38) -
I try to call down the contours of sound
whose words are like those of a bird
...
The air and its instrument alphabet,
the neume that calls back to the bird. (p.43) -
It doesn't matter who I am, nor that my lips
speak and close before you see them move. (p.47) -
the glass cell
of spoken thought:
a self uttermost
inside a space
as far as a human
voice is thrown. (p.51) -
And so, in his words, the dark
speeds from his throat as the silence
that breaks to surround his tongue.
It is where he listens: the rift
where the speaker enters his speech -
where the I is heard and hidden. (p.59) -
Let us slip the habits
of ourselves and reap the silence
that of its nothing grows (p.85)
Some other poems end with a statement about the failure to express -
-
The nests that sowed the world
with young are empty, and the young are lost
on wings too new to know, calling
for the broken heaven of the speckled blue egg
I keep as a secret and cannot let go (p.25) -
The rain has sifted pale Saharan dust
in desert powders ghosting water's trails
across the sun-drowned day's midsummer crust.
The air remembers how to move but fails. (p.27) -
Trees half-spoken in a winter mist
start to walk in a distant speech
that stills again when they are seen
a few steps nearer to the ear they reach (p.73) -
The bunting has vanished into the art of its plumage
but, like the cry out of sight, is nonetheless
real unseen, for being both feather and veil.
The man in the hide, out of reach of his language,
is blown on the notes that rise through the reeds to the ear (p.77)
The language is usually elevated, with a wide vocabulary -
-
Those figures at work in the wound of a fen
I see from a train have cut the skin
of the several worlds with the same precision
as the sacred geometry of the first propylon (p.18) -
Weird as a withered human foot
once held to be that of a saint -
refuse from a reliquary pillaged
for the jewelled slipper it had worn -
this fallen oak, all bole, its branches
long since lopped by the dead
for the dead, lies like the uncut hull
of a Bronze Age boat on the lost shore
of its flickering field. (p.37) -
had not been seen since human fires
burned so low they let the night
etch the mind with all its stars (p.74)
Poems from Poetry London, Poetry Review, Magma, Rialto, etc. His first degree was Law at Cambridge (irrationally perhaps, I prefer writers not to have a first degree in literature). It's tempting to thank his legal training for his control over long sentences, and his exploitation of sound effects is perhaps influenced by his reading of the Romantics. Iambics haunt many of the poems, and lines like "