My latest bunch o’ poems, The Zircon Ferries, is out now with Beir Bua Press. Thanks so much to Michelle Moloney King and the press for publishing it, and to Ella Johnston for the artwork on the cover and the vispo elements inside.
Here’s some nice stuff people have said about the poems:
And here’s a poem as a taster:
Some History Revision
Perhaps towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars
and the early years of EastEnders,
with Pat Butcher sailing back to Cannes from Elba
where she’d exiled alone in a replica edition of
The Queen Vic,
and the call to arms was simply to
pour some pints, wave some flags,
and the bends in the river went on and on.
Even then we felt something needed to give
as Prussia was restored to its former borders,
Britain sized up its economic power and
Bono considered a cowboy hat.
The Congress of Vienna,
delivered by Walls or Lyons Maid
sustained us through a decade of hot summers
foreign films on Channel 4
and European football bans.
Let’s not forget
in the analogue of days,
that hayfever found us in any green room.
It meant a day off books, revision time
for abdications at Rochefort,
Murat confused with Marat,
Wicksy merging with Curly Watts,
channel-hopping again
as we lived through deconstruction.
We never knew enough. Still don’t.
It would be easy to cry about it, and maybe tempting,
all of us waiting for plot twists, following
the narrative arcs of characters
who now seem little more than clichés.
Don’t start, some facts persist
and somewhere some new coalition is polishing the optics,
seeking its brief period of costly domination,
waiting for the drums to kick things off.
Elsewhere there’s Immanuel Kant and Steve McQueen (or not), and painter Agnes Martin and a lizard caught in a thesaurus as it tries to cross the road, and philosopher Jacques Ranciere, and the meaning of an ‘oppolin’, and business meetings, and Andy Warhol, and a cheese sandwich, and trends in crisps, and a hoopoe, and Blackfriars Bridge, and object-oriented theory and, well, more. Etc.
You can get it here, and it doesn’t cost a lot (prices are shown in dollars but it prints regionally), so please support this marvellous experimental press in Co. Tipperary if you can – it’ll help keep the interesting stuff happening. And I’ll love you forever and more..
MWB
MW Bewick 