Totally excited to announce that I have a new longish-pamphlet of poems, The Zircon Ferries, coming out at the end of August 2021 with the incredible Beir Bua Press. The press, based in Co. Tipperary, is run by award-winning poet Michelle Moloney King. It’s the publishing press of sister site Beir Bua Journal and publishes experimental, avant-garde and vispo poetry pamphlets – and there’s a bit of all of that in The Zircon Ferries. Beir Bua is the perfect place for it, so I’m delighted to be there.

I know, it’s been just over a year since Pomes Flixus was published, but I’ve somehow been writing at pace, which I like, and making quick and brutal edits, rather than procrastinating over decisions and making ponderous revisions. I think that the process has kept them vivid and fresh and packed with ideas. To quote from the intro:

‘The poems, writings, texts – I’m not too concerned with definitions – in this short collection of recent work is purposely heteroglossic. Or maybe that’s polyphonous, or dialogic, in its multifarious registers of language. It encompasses instances of office jargon, marketing strategy terminology, symbols lifted from popular culture, references to continental philosophy, Marxist theory, art theory and critical studies, old documentary footage, movie-star biographies, science texts, Elizabethan drama, nature writing, local observation, memoir, dreams, overheard conversations, below-the-line comment from websites, phrases altered sequentially through an online thesaurus, the occasional neologism, slang… and more.”

Here’s a taster:

So, you get three philosophers for the price of one. The Third? Henri Lefebvre provides the title and something of the narrative. It’s that kind of collection.

I have an author page at Beir Bua here, or you could just go and buy The Zircon Ferries at the shop here.

But what are the Zircon Ferries? Well. Well well. We’ll see.

MWB

Lovely to see a review of Pomes Flixus make into London Grip. Thanks to Julie Hogg (a fantastic poet herself) and to Michael and everyone at LG.

Read the review here.

Correspondence between poet, publisher and City Lights bookshop owner Laurence Ferlinghetti, who has just died, and the poet Frank O’Hara.

“We remain apprentice robots. I certainly hope that you have not become robots, but on the contrary that you have become very humanised. That’s my hope.”

The Lonely Crowd Issue 12 is published today and I’m delighted to have three poems in it – ‘Found Poem for Philip Glass’, ‘David, Again’ and ‘Music of the Woods’. At 325 pages it’s a whopper of an issue, with prose, essays and interviews as well as poems, and it’s a smart-looking thing, too.

Thanks to editor John Lavin, for putting it all together and featuring some of my writing. A real pleasure to be included.

So into December we go. A really gloomy day here in the wilds of north Essex today. But that’s only right for this time of year, yeah?

It feels like a blink since we were publishing Pomes Flixus six months ago. Yet how bright and green the late days of May seem now.

Did you get hold of a copy of the book yourself? Did you mean to? Well, if you order one from Dunlin Press any time before the end of the year I’ll personally throw in something extra for Christmas. Think of it as an advent calendar surprise.

Here’s a poem from the collection:

‘Here’s That Rainy Day’

As we look out to a little street
all the parked commuter cars
the houses there beyond the river
the feeling that summer never quite got going
but here with a view after all
of our occasional need for ease and quiet
content in a kind of neutral mid-tempo
but also finding reason
in a quickness unfolding around us
where the drains fill with a thirst of ages
the hydrangeas by the corner
almost insanely thankful
the birds instantly much quieter
heading for the birches and false acacias
things that know best how to handle these moments
all round the ringed roads of the estate
like coaxial thoughts that desired being straightened
or vertical like rain
forgetting that rain has its inflections
or that sometimes there’s little
between rain and drenched air
all deep-wet for something
that needs us without regret
and feels effortless
as a soft voice falling in a shower of notes.

Okay then. Want to see a bit more? Go here. Want to make an oldish writer smile by placing an order? Go here.

Stay safe everyone.

xx

“These poems document the act of seeing and thinking about what is being seen just as Creeley’s work sometimes does. Memory and imagination are also here in abundance…”

Rupert Loydell reviewed Pomes Flixus and The Orphaned Spaces in Stride magazine back in September. You can read them here.