BOOK REVIEW

The Sun is Open By Gail McConnell Published by Penned in the Margins In 1984 the author’s father was murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army outside his home. The author, who was three years old at the time, was witness to her father’s brutal slaying. The author kept a ‘Dad Box’: cuttings and fragments

ALL LIFE IS NOISE

mind going backwards to the IED – the one by the path not the car not the firing-point not the one that took a soldier’s face so many – a mind made of sepia voices wrapped in newsprint washed away yesterdays red streams through barren field-dressings drown my mind. Politics is just noise in my

The Wonder of an Eye

Silver beads green mercury of summer rain bristling light rounding sky into the wonder of an eye.

Another Exodus of Air

A poem – of sorts – about Covid and Isolation. To those places we reach to when there are no hands to grasp.

The Captain And The Tempest

“Either we live in peace, or we have no life worth living,” said the Captain as he returned, wearied by a tempest of stinging verse. I remember the tattered sky that morning, faces littered with snows of sepia frowns, smiles trodden into ruin. Sun-polished, the horizon quickened light across the red blade of its rim,

A Song Of Broken Leaves

How can you carve a face from air is it merely seeing something which is not there – just lines and curves falling from despair – but those eyes consider mine with curiosity not blind to this skin parched by time how does air summon radiance into rough dreams of shadow tracing shades softly into

Rapture

Put in your diversions now. Which way is the light moving? Shadows, stuttering down from the roofs, lying broken on the road. The light is twisting itself in between the shadows. Coiling upwards like a funnel. One-zero-zero, stop any vehicles heading citywards. Heat. So hot. Heat is falling like rain. Hissing into shadow. The buildings

Random Act Of Nature

Stubborn light leaps through the fishhook’s brawny crook of wood braiding nets of bramble and whets the edge of lancing leaf risen ocean’s fluted guest brings heaven’s rest to dreaming eyes.

Blood Letter

Ladies and gentlemen. I give you the spectacle of a fragment of a morsel of a crumb of a hallucinatory experience, ably performed by WE. It can take a moment or two before you realise the soldier should not be lying crumpled against the wall in the canteen. Should he..? No, wait. This is 2014.

Blood Rose

Twitter is a mindfield. You can be as careful as you want; stepping through images and videos of sunrises poured from vessels of gold and smokey greens, and then you go and stumble onto a naked man being stoned and beaten to death on the edge of the world. Bit like memories..? Those which salve,