Books

  • Books:
  • Carnivorous
  • Blood Horses,
  • Beneath The Ice,
  • Snakeskin Stilettos,
  • The Horse's Nest,
  • Miracle Fruit,
  • Selected Poems,
  • The Goose Tree

About Me

My photo
Poet, creative writing facilitator, editor. Experienced mentor for those working towards a first collection. My publishers are Lagan Press, Belfast and Liberties Press, Dublin, who published my Selected Poems in 2012, The Goose Tree in June 2014. Blood Horses was published in 2018 from Caesura Press www.caesurapress.co.uk and a new collection, Carnivorous was published from Doire Press Spring 2019 www.doirepress.com Awarded an Arts Council of NI Major Artist Award in 2019

Sunday 28 February 2016

from the window


I'm so lucky to have a view of fields and trees from my kitchen window and I love to sit at the table and just observe. Often what I see seeps into my psyche.


Prey

This summer past, day after day, I watched the buzzard
rise from her stand of trees to hunt; watched her describe
her wide effortless circles, as a wheel set in motion, turns.

This autumn night she has gyred silently above my sleep
so that now at four a.m., I lie awake beneath her dream
and the small, secretive animal of self, trembles.

 

Thursday 18 February 2016

For the day that's in it

There was a taste of Spring in the air today and I was thinking about my mother, Nessa and her sister Muriel, now also gone. The daffodils are starting to bloom and it reminded me of these two poems.

The first I wrote when my mother was going through the hell of late dementia and the second is more recent. They are the same daffodils in both poems.


Daffodils

 

The Vertues: The roots stamped with hony, helpeth them that are burned with fire. They have also such wonderful qualities in drying, that they consound and glew together very great wounds.*

Gerard’s Herbal

 

1

I thought it was a fool’s errand, thought

we’d never find the place,

my mother trying to navigate

with only a vague address to go by –

a farm somewhere outside Millisle.

My children bored, fighting in the back seat,

my nerves on edge, my hands too tight

on the steering wheel, stress levels high.

 

But we got there, loaded sackfuls of bulbs

into the car’s boot, and paid the man.

 

For weeks afterwards, I’d look out the window

and see my mother on her knees, digging,

planting daffodils behind hedges, among trees.

 

2

My mother has descended into hell

(these biblical allusions haunt me),

and daffodils are the only colour in this Easter,

yellow incongruities across the dull fields,

painfully there, like the resurrection of love.

 

I cut them against despair, bring

huge bundles of them into the house,

beacons burning in vases, on windowsills.



 
 
 
 
 
Spring

 

It’s trespass time.

I’ll take my scissors

across the fields

to where my mother

planted her daffodils.

 

It’s not really stealing is it?

Anyway I feel no guilt,

there are so many drifts

a few dozen blossoms

won’t be missed.