It's been a while since I posted anything. I just can't seem to find the time despite a multitude of things I'd love to write & post, owing to my recent indulgence into an MA in English Literary Studies at Exeter University. My studies are mycorrhizally fruitful, bringing me up-to-yet uncharted insights. The future of [...]
I met Polly through friends, & being told she was a poet, meeting her I just got a good feeling she was legit; she sent me her latest book ‘Grieving with the Animals’ & reading just the first few pages I knew that my initial assumption was correct. Here is a body of poems, authentic in their tone of feeling, pressing in their effect & imperative as an annex to the growing oeuvre of Anthropocene poetry.
In October a review I wrote for The High Window will be published, so I am glad you can get a window into the poems before then through Chris Murray’s inimitable Poet Head. Enjoy.
I came home
to find him
doing nothing.
Limp armed.
Could do nothing.
Sat on the sofa
lost to the world.
I have some bad news
I’ve been seeing ghosts. Birds on water.
The day before I received the news, two swans flew low over my head. Their wings thrummed
like a helicopter.
Eyes turned to watch the rescue vehicle, and instead saw white bellies.
The sound travelled, nothing like their usual flapping, as they soared over and onto water.
Returning to my boat, a shadow shifted on the river bank. A furry creature – small, sleek – edged
its way through the grass, took a moment to drink, then slop, slipped in.
Animals are in communion for you.
As are we,
nosing each other’s armpits
as we bed in
for warm companionship.
Because you went cold.
Though the civility of civilisation frightens me, I visit…
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I A machine enters the forest. The trees, the endorphined air as well as the birds’ circumspection play dead. Until they start intuiting the machine’s curiosity, its authentic verisimilitude, its making note, they will not dare resume as usual. Resigned to it being, in their midst. They reorient, relate-to the [...]
An object oriented poem with a little savoury biology. We eat, mashing the meat of the matter with calcium evolved enough to cope with it. Flesh of its flesh become flesh of our flesh. Nothing, not even death can be inert. The meat of it never thought, despite the organisms nattering via calendar & root, [...]
It has taken me longer to get this done than I promised. I started writing it just before I was due to move to Exeter. I am beginning to settle in here. But Jeju & Korea are never far from my thoughts. Genesis Yoon Yong as both hero & poem germinated together. I had read [...]
This is the final Yoon Yong poem. I am in the process of writing a proper analysis/epilogue about the poem, as requested by a couple of loyal readers. I hope to have it done by next week. Thank you for reading these poems. If anyone who would like these poems sent to them as a [...]
It is worth remarking that "mense" is a shortening of menstruation, which I have heard Korean women, my ex-wife especially, say; however, I cannot further elucidate the reason, but can only speculate, if this is because menstruation is a difficult word, or if the shortening has become shorthand Konglish, thus the source becoming lost the [...]
Yoon Yong dreams. Napping on a sea wall after midnight …She steals a trampoline from a trim backyard —carries it on her back | over the spinal cord of the Taebaek mountain range to the edge of the world (all signposted) —looks out on a sea of shadows teasing her vulnerabilities into [...]
Yoon Yong is drunk again. Drinking to forget again (nearly home time) …3 bottles of Soju later & staggering thoughtfully through tight gullies | her stomach packed full of pig | mouth reeking of garlic noxious enough to stun a jindo—the stars like pheasant tracks —if you count all the stars is [...]
A poem from Yoon Yong. I had a debate in the pub the other week about onanism. I have a theory that the violence of men, may have its root in onanism: in one onanistic act, a man lays waste on a rag, to an entire population. Dylan Thomas was concerned with this. So is [...]
being, the other, and narrative identity. a study on the recent thoughts in philosophy.
Novelist, travel writer, nature writer; lover of people and place.
“ There, I am desperately free and naive; but knowing this oh dear happiness, dear misery; there is no distinctive sign except that one tearing one’s heart, and a smile destined to nobody(...)" E.Stachura
all about travelling in korea
