I have a new collection of poems, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol, coming out with Cinnamon Press in October. Here is a taster from it and you can find out more about the collection and order the book on Cinnamon’s website
Road Kill
In her book about mammal evolution, Beasts Before Us, Elsa Panciroli mentions, almost in passing, that 1,000,000 animals are killed every day on the roads of America. Multiply this up around the world, and many species are likely to become extinct because they cannot breed faster than they are crushed to death by traffic. Hedgehogs come to mind.
Roadkill
Travel on, that was the imperative
and we did down the narrow roads of Wales
Caernarfon, Dolgellau, Cemmaes, Machynlleth
macadam threaded through a needle’s eye
sewing shrouds for the roadkill, a pheasant here a rabbit
there and I’m sure that was a raptor whose wing
flipped up in the slipstream of the car ahead
in a nonchalant goodbye
who could do justice to this in paint
I thought Goya but no, Bacon was the man
raw humans stripped of skin
writhing on the bed and not so different
from burst bodies on the roads
tubes of grey for intestines squeezed out fast
for Bacon was a hurried painter and we were hurried too
driving home or what we called home
he would pay attention to the squashed skull’s eyes
pressed out of the sockets
just as if the Screaming Pope or the Man in Blue
lay down ahead in the road we travelled
because they were done for too.
Had I Been There
I am a great admirer of Katherine Mansfield, and reread her stories every year. She was one of those rare writers—Joseph Conrad was another—who are great poets whose medium happened to be prose. She was also a fascinating, intricate person whose life was both rich and tragic.
Had I Been There
Thinking of Katherine Mansfield
I wonder if there is any film of her
walking across the lawn of a summer garden
in clothes that look black or dark grey
but may have been red, tight-skirted
after the fashion with a little parasol
she pointed at the camera and waved
girl-like but not quite, with a skittish self-
conscious hand accentuated of course
by the jerkiness of the film, and beyond
a border of grey and white flowers
a Scotty dog yapping silently at the lens
could I have been there waiting to say
how dowdy and beautiful she looked
her hand already reaching up to draw
the curtain across a life she knew
would be brief which she had to fashion
into the poetry of the stories before
the flooding of her lungs with blood.
To the Editor
It is a hard slog editing a poetry magazine these days. It often seems there are more aspiring poets than readers of poetry, all crowding at the editor’s door.
To the Editor
Poetry is a shark not a flatfish
whatever were you doing publishing flatfish?
we want thrashing about, bloodin the water, and you offer flatfish
throw them back into the dull heave
of ocean but look out for sharkfinning itself in that eerie sinister
way around the hull of your magazine
no more flatfish, give us shark!