SMUDGE

A second collection, published by Littoral Press, out now.

Opinions will vary.  To say the least: the included poems have appeared all over and I am glad to bring them together here. There's a process going on and I judge this is a full step forward from Pilgrim Station.

Chris’s coincidental creation and unveiling of A Darker Quay, the cover painting, which arrived by email on the MS's week of send and acceptance is apt and it is Dark, yes, but the augurs are good!

Distribution falls to me and copies are available.  Do get in touch:
£10 inc pp, by paypal: djamesdom7@gmail.com 

Meanwhile, a first review at The London Grip, 19 Feb.  

Where be your silver branches now, your jibes, your gambols, flashes of merriment 

A Darker Quay

Proofs approved for a new collection, SMUDGE, coming out next week, i expect.  It has been five years since Pilgrim Station, and the work’s moved on.  A very good reception from Littoral Press, and a stunning blurb from David Cooke of The High Window – I was stunned – among other high points, celebrating my sense of sound and rhythm; that great bugbear, calmed. 

The MS was read and approved In the first week of the year, and by chance I was sent this entirely appropriate picture in the same week:  instant, classic poetry cover. It’s a good month for the poet!  More to follow, you bet there is.  Dom.  

A Darker Quay - C.A. Hutchens

Poet and Place

With videos of David Cooke and Adam Horovitz joining Katie Lloyd-Nunn (on the brink of 1,000 hits), another of my own slips through as i prowl the internet for more candidates.  This film touches on a walk in the Welsh Hills, with a picnic in a hayfield, a paddle in the river Lugg, the core of it being my old buddy David's guitar.

My youtube channel: 

If you are in reach of Gloucestershire and interested in making a poetry video, I still have time and resources available, get in touch

Adam Horovitz

Pig Island Letters 2

James K Baxter, who i don't flatter with the best in a batch of phototographic portraiture, though dying young, wrote a touching piece on the poetic menopause, I think, on that fear of losing touch with younger passions, the fury of adolescence... i can't find it anywhere.  A noteworthy poet. I'd recommend "The Essential Baxter."

To keep him in mind something else will do, this from,
Pig Island Letters.

From an old house shaded with macrocarpas
Rises my malady.
Love is not valued much in Pig Island
Though we admire its walking parody,

That brisk gaunt woman in the kitchen
Feeding the coal range, sullen
To all strangers, less one should be
Her antique horn-red Satan.

Her man, much baffled, grousing in the pub,
Discusses sales 
Of yearling lambs, the timber in a tree
Thrown down by autumn gales,

Her daughter, reading in her room
A catalogue of dresses,
Can drive a tractor, goes to Training College,
Will vote on the side of the Bosses,

Her son is moodier, has seen
An angel with a sword
Standing above the clump of old man manuka
Just waiting for the word

To overturn the cities and the rivers
And split the house like a rotten totara log.
Quite unconcerned he sets his traps for 'possums
And whistles to his dog.

The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island
About the love they dread
Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them
And will lie some day with their dead.

Katie's River Voices

The first in a planned series on Poet and Place, this was filmed at local pal Katie's wild swimming spot.

I, too, dislike it.

Burnside's essays made me look at Marianne Moore, I don't quite see the how or why I was turned away from her before, perhaps it was a concussion from the following generation's positively putting a gap between her and them: although the elder her corrected the younger one severely.  I am enjoying the younger self in "New Collected Poems".  But here is a later revision of the subject in hand:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
   it, after all, a place for the genuine.