Chimera Times You’ve lived beyond your relevance— Another song, another age, Another line while in a trance, Routine by prompt, an empty stage. The art lives past the life, and all They want is what you did when young, The bright first thing, the curtain call, When fireworks flew and bells were rung. Yet still … Read more
The con cometh The demon smirks, having laid out her wares. Will they see what she’s doing? Will they realise how they’re being taken in? Not all will grasp how an influencer works. She hopes they won’t. Her power over them depends on her ability to cajole and deceive. She insinuates herself into their thoughts, … Read more
Ion Light itself is a chapel an east-west wash spilt on the Christmas rose. Space itself is a chapel a fruitless bowl flowers dried in a jug. Life itself is a chapel at water’s edge murmur of patient prayer. Feature Image: Saint Enodoc Church, Trebetherick, Cornwall, U.K.
Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
Gillnets I remember as a child picking them out from the bow, and peering down at currents moving freely through their masks – the net draped from an orderly row of cork floaters, near shore. There a canopy of beeches could dapple light onto the water’s surface, or space between two pine boughs slant a … Read more
There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris slinging hammocks of intent between each step, hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses. No one knows. Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain. Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu. No one. Not even the off-duty gendarme … Read more
Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025) “A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk … Read more
Luke 2:1-7 _ It was the time Augustus Caesar had cried pax As children used to do, and said the world must now be taxed, _ When Joseph, following the government decree, Went out of Nazareth and travelled down through Galilee. _ If … Read more
Eternal Return My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about Patrick Kavanagh. O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth And I can see those fucking potatoes, The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan! Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected To this … Read more