Arma virumque cano – ‘I sing of arms and the man’. With these resonant words Virgil opens his great epic the Aeneid, composed over two thousand years ago. The poem, which is nearly ten thousand lines long, is written almost entirely in dactylic hexameter – an astonishing feat of constrained writing, especially when we consider that Virgil lacked the convenience of our modern-day word processing and editing tools.
Continue readingSometime during the fourth century, in northwest China, a woman named Su Hui picked up her silk thread and embarked on an embroidery project. The result was an extraordinary work of visual poetry – a grid of 29 x 29 characters, shuttle-woven on brocade to form a palindrome poem that would become known as Xuanji Tu, or the ‘Star Gauge’.
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‘Iterations of Emptying’ is shaped by the Sierpinski carpet fractal. It was first published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 11 Issue 1 (2021) and has also appeared in Poetrishy #1.
As we approach the end of a year dominated by chaos, bleakness, and the ravages of the pandemic, it is difficult not to succumb to despair. We seem to be caught up in the ‘widening gyre’ of Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in January 1919, at a time when the First World War had only recently ended, the political situation in his native Ireland was dangerously unstable and the Spanish ‘flu pandemic was raging (his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees became very ill and almost died from the ‘flu). It’s hardly surprising that a sense of impending doom reverberates through the poem.
Continue readingThe glass, half-full, is cracked. I notice this when I raise it to my lips and your face fractures beyond the rim. Sometimes we see what was not there before or what was always there but we were looking at the water not the glass, which slithers from my hands, hurtles to the ceiling and explodes. A thousand splinters glint around my head.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
Who hears hyenas laugh beneath a wounded moon? We are small, man, small. Sweet taste of pears and your absent breath. Let go of unread books, of souvenirs from unremembered holidays. Switch off the news, the flames, the words. Look to the sky between the trees; windstill and clear.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
This poem first appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions (ed. Matthew M. C. Smith) Black Bough Poetry 2021.
This poem first appeared in my pamphlet Fractal Poems (Penteract Press, 2021)
I used to loathe coordinate geometry at school, mainly because we had to calculate, plot and draw the graphs by hand. My geometry notebooks were full of wobbly parabolas and ellipses that staggered uncertainly from point to point rather than flowing in one smooth, continuous curve.
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‘Sungrazer’ first appeared in Consilience Journal in June 2021.