Avoidance
Comfortable, cozy you are
in the safety of four walls
pasted in lavish satin
soft hues, golden threads
and exquisite embroidery
far away from risk of battle
hammering just outside
your front step, always
calculating ifs and whys
falling or losing
fear controlling, mind abusing
your logic, yet when
love beckons you
you don’t embrace it
and when affection
dwells in your heart
you don’t bestow it
unto the dry petals of your life
why are you still breathing?
Excerpt
Last year at Brodick was a disaster. It should have literally been the last. But back they came.
‘This year will be even better than last,’ his mother had written. ‘Morag is her old self again after that awful experience in August and Rowena is just such a sweet little doll. We are going to be so happy showing her off to all the other guests and visitors. She will be the Little Belle of Brodick this year. If only your dear father could be there in flesh instead of in spirit. But how proud he must be in any case, as I am. Hamish has continual headaches these days and Alec is pale and liverish from working so hard. They both need the holiday at Brodick, as you must too. Could you not take the earlier week off and be with us the whole time? After all, you are the boss of that firm of yours. And Morag never sees you through the year. She misses you. She says you are becoming more a stranger than a brother.’
This year the changes of last year were twelve months worse. Mrs Anderson’s whole body was turning to steel, like her tiny, ball-bearing eyes. Morag was no longer pregnant. She was anaemic and tired and bitchier than ever. Rowena ran away every time Ian approached and screamed that he was going to beat her. This invariably brought Morag or her mother or both of them running to the child’s side, yelling at Ian to leave the little dote alone, to act his age and stop bullying a mere infant. Hamish and Alec sat all day every day in the stuffy sitting room, playing cribbage almost interminably. There were no walks, no golf, no drinks. Only the boat-trips were continued, apparently for Rowena’s sake, but Ian had missed those during the first week of the holiday.
‘Never mind, Ian; we’ll all enjoy the return trip to Gourock at the end of the week,’ his mother said. ‘It’ll be so lovely to have us all together again, the whole family, sailing up the Clyde towards home. I bet your dear father is sighing so contentedly if only we could hear him.’
‘I won’t be going back with you at the end of the week.’
‘What do you mean, Ian; you won’t be going back with us at the end of the week? Of course you will.’ His mother’s voice grew shrill, like the high-pitched squeal of scraped metal.
‘I won’t be. I’m leaving this morning. I’m catching the boat back to Belfast tonight.’
‘But Ian, it’s only Tuesday,’ Morag pointed out. ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’
‘Look your fill,’ said Ian, glancing at his watch. ‘You’ve got one hour and thirty-five minutes.’
‘Oh you insufferable, inhuman monster,’ Morag yelled. ‘You’re making a mockery out of family feelings and affections.’
Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin poetry Awards
And so is this one who has aged and whose sin
and regret don’t keep her awake beyond herself
and who doesn’t care for gossip and such
These are today’s women, one of them says,
their husband is never enough and how can
he be enough when he’s old? The other said, and
compassion, standing erect, shines like a shield
in the sundown with Justice hanging onto it
like a thousand-year-old toothless mast, still
shivering in its anger. The third maid, the wisest,
kept her mouth shut and her eyes were blind and
floating in dreams.
Truly strange: people talk about everything foreign
and distant to them
while they experience all other burning things
which keep them awake during the night
in their silence
and when they die they take them to their grave;
for this reason the dead are silent since they live
their true life in the grave.
In fact the clerk was ready to read the daily police
reports in the tomorrow news. Indeed he was on time:
certainly five years in jail.
He didn’t know, perhaps because he always hated
the keys,
that each person keeps the key to their prison in
their pocket
and pretends to have forgotten it, and this is
their prison.
JOY
Hope the flower opposite the bulrush
smiles like my love for the verdure
cypress plays tenderly with the rays
graves become fragrant wedding chambers
pulse of the forest, gallop of a doe
next to where we two were laid
wild lilies dripped their souls
a bloody rose, my joy blooms.
I see the breeze playing with your hair
your eyes are deep as I find
the path of my life this April
I no longer fear for the anemone
which wilts in the love of life
and I charge to drink the nectar of your lips.
Hera
The moment came when Hera ordered
to throw me into
the darkness of the uterus, moist, protecting,
cell by cell
molecule by molecule
the concept of division
to define concepts, images
yet undecipherable
I wasn’t bad in my crudeness
many-faceted
multi-layered
manifold
the expressionist
the hedonist
the self-absorbed
the life’s laughter that I was
meant to become
when the cosmic
compromise
started taking control
of my life
Between Minimal and Infinite
No one is born in his homeland
some souls welcome us to life
others say goodbye departing
in between we float
at the mercy of a foreign language
rusted words empty shells
meaningful urns
beings focused on the foolishness of love
sailors of heavenly seeds,
unwritten music scores
sailboats unload
light and colourful allegories
mythology memory of light and darkness
I would trade my days to regain
a new birth in the loss
this Edem is not in our time
it is a fiber of the heart
blind music shadow of the mind
searches for a world
habituated different light
overflowing but doesn’t change
wedged in the flow of ecstasy
between the minimal and infinity
Excerpt
Cyber Love
What strange games our minds play with us, my love!
I started falling in love with you, without even knowing you.
I have never heard your voice yet I dream of you and I find myself worrying about you.
I “feel” you sad, tired and stressed.
I expect your messages, you vanish for a day and I miss you so much.
Slowly I fall in love with you. You come into my mind and in my soul deviously you coil yourself around me like a spider its web, it becomes my sweet routine.
How are you in reality?
Is your smile the way I imagine it?
Is your hug the way I close my eyes and imagine it?
Your arms?
And that sadness and melancholy that goes through the words and reaches my soul? Is it true as I feel it?
Excerpt
The picnic brought out most of the people who lived in the vicinity
of the school or whose children attended the school. As
well, because it was a Sunday, people from other school districts as
well as relatives and friends of the parents came to gossip and to
munch on a few goodies. It was usually a relaxing day for the
adults and their only concern was to avoid sunburn and prevent
their children from consuming so much food that their little
stomachs would rebel and reject the contents. Which frequently
happened. They came on foot or in wagons and some even in cars.
Those who arrived by wagon would unhitch their horses, lead
them into the barn for the day and join their friends and neighbours
beside the school and the confectionery stalls. They stood
around in circles or brought out chairs or sat on the grass in the
shade to smoke and talk. Thewomen watched their children, compared
notes and exchanged information on various women things.
We found out in the evening whether any of our school indiscretions
had been leaked from the loose lips of our friends, then
through their mothers to our mother, and were relieved when no
accusations were made or suspicious questions posed to us.
The children did what children always do; they began by
spending some of their money on the various goodies before gathering
on the sports field to play games, as they waited for the official
program to begin. On a nice warm day, the merchants would
be very busy selling pop and ice cream, not to mention a variety of
candies, suckers and chocolate bars as well as items such as oranges
and hundreds of hot dogs. Even though the prizes awarded
to the winners were chits for food items, the children could not resist
the temptation of the smells and sights and just had to have
some of the good things before the races started.
At approximately 1:00 PM the main organizer, usually the principal,
would get his teachers and other helpers together and they
would walk out to the sports field to begin the various races.
Reviewed by AI
…At the same time, the collection’s erotic gaze can become rhetorically intense, even overwhelming. “Nonchalance,” “Labyrinth,” “At the Restaurant,” “At the Metro,” “Shopping,” “Heatwave,” and “Conches” frequently place the beloved body at the centre of the speaker’s imaginative world. This is consistent with the poet’s lyric practice, in which Eros is a cosmic and metaphysical force. However, the strongest poems are those that preserve the beloved as an active participant rather than only an object of description. “Music,” for example, works because touch, kiss, and the word “transcendence” are shared gestures. The poem’s lyric force comes from mutuality.
Greek mythology is another important source of the collection’s vocabulary. Eros, Hades, Elysium, Chronos, Thanatos, and ancient figures of fate or divinity appear beside phones, buses, supermarkets, restaurants, news broadcasts, and military technology. This collision between mythic and contemporary registers is central to the book’s aesthetic. Myth allows the speaker to enlarge ordinary experience, while contemporary details prevent the mythological language from becoming merely ornamental. In “Hunters,” two men with rifles become participants in a fatal, almost mythic encounter with Thanatos. In “Hummingbird,” the speaker imagines rebirth through the primordial womb before being recalled to the immediate task of watching a bird feed.
The book’s use of imagery is consistently painterly. Red, black, white, blue, gold, and purple recur with symbolic intensity. Red is particularly mobile: it is blood, carnation, wine, erotic heat, political violence, and the colour of the book’s title. Black appears in mourning clothes, coal dust, weaponry, night, industrial extraction, and the fear of death. Their interaction is never stable. The book’s world is not divided cleanly into passion and darkness; each colour enters the territory of the other.
“Retired Collier” and “Bitumen” provide a powerful late pairing. The former portrays a former miner whose body and memory remain marked by coal: black lungs, tunnels, quotas, labour, old age, and the residual darkness of industrial work. “Bitumen” expands this blackness into a critique of resource extraction, multinational profit, atherosclerosis, ecological damage, and financial abstraction. The poems suggest that black is not merely a colour of death but an economic and environmental condition. It accumulates in the body, the landscape, and the language of corporate value.
Formally, Red in Black is composed primarily of short free-verse poems, often one per page. This presentation gives each lyric a visual autonomy and allows for sharp tonal shifts. The book’s structure is associative rather than narrative. Eros gives way to war, war to domestic observation, domestic observation to philosophical meditation, and then back again. This movement can be disorienting, but it is also meaningful. The collection insists that no experience can be safely compartmentalized. A supermarket can contain both erotic reverie and economic decay; a bus can contain marital loss and public violence; a restaurant can contain paradise while war persists elsewhere.
At times, the collection’s density of imagery and abstraction works against precision. Words such as “eternity,” “transcendence,” “totality,” “freedom,” “meaning,” and “perfection” recur often. They are most effective when rooted in a concrete situation: Fatima’s lentils, Paul’s missing leg, the old man’s maple leaf, the driver’s glass partition, or the bread crumbs offered to sparrows. The poems gain particular force when the philosophical claim emerges from a material scene rather than preceding it.
This tension is nevertheless integral to the poet’s work. Red in Black is ambitious because it wants lyric poetry to address both the intimate and the geopolitical, both sensual experience and public systems of violence. It refuses the false choice between erotic beauty and ethical responsibility. Its most compelling poems reveal that these domains are already connected: the body that desires is also the body that can be wounded, displaced, aged, exploited, or mourned.
Ultimately, Red in Black is a collection of ethical contrasts. It contrasts private pleasure with public catastrophe, political rhetoric with bodily injury, industrial profit with environmental and human damage, and death with the small acts of care that keep life meaningful. Its governing colours therefore become moral as well as aesthetic categories. Red is not only passion, and black is not only despair. Both are elements of a world that must be seen clearly if poetry is to remain a language of witness.
Excerpt
She kicked the crotch of the guy who always calls me Fuckbeard when
Jago’s back is turned, but they managed to hustle her out,along with tearful
Cedric who’d turned his back on the whole scenario.
Now that all is quiet in the dorm, with Wolfbane locked away in solitary and
his supporting cast tranked down safely in their pits, I can safely itemise matters
relating to the Order of the Brazen Head. I’ve gobbed out today’s input of
sleepy-time, thanks to Simba throwing a shrill tantrum that distracted Jago at a
crucial moment of the dosage ritual.
So now, around midnight, in the little cone of bedside light, I am the only
sentient being in the Creation, an archivist of the Akashic scrolls.
Pol Pot’s revolution may have destroyed my artifacts but not the cellular
structure of my memory. Of course she ransacked our home, looting, pillaging,
laying waste . . . But I have the Lore by heart. I’ve copied it out laboriously
over the years, filling a whole series of these black books. Jago pretends to
humour me in this, but I still won’t reveal my stash as his own humours are far
from consistent.
For example, only last month he had a sudden pre-breakfast purge of our
“traumatic memorabilia”, our “hoard of faecal souvenirs” as he called the contents
of our bedside lockers. “This is the dark body of the Madonna you must
destroy!” he shouted at Eamonn and Cedric, sweeping away their framed photos
with his fat hand, grinding the pics underfoot, those saintly mothers and
martyred wives, whoever, it’s all the same to Jago whenever the neo-Freudian
fit hits him.
Yet he was only inches away from a lost knowledge more subversive than
any of his primal infantile soap-operas. I declare this is the Gnosis of the Brazen
head and these are the lost letters of its Lore:
73 Harsnett Road,
London SE 27
March 8, 1943
Dear Firestone,
What a pleasure to receive your letter! It displays a grasp of occult scholarship
which is impressive for someone still in their first year of undergraduate
studies, albeit in the shadow of the Bodleian Library, near the banks of Isis. I
myself took my first degree at Cambridge before my brief scholastic period at
the seminary in Rome and my later researches in Vienna. But the cloisters of
Oxford must still be charged with ancient potency, even in these dismal times.
