BETWEEN PROSPECT AND REFUGE
This is a series of poems that explore the hinterland of commonplace experience from the vantage point of the ‘other scene’ and across a range of idioms and genres. There are love poems, poems of separation and loss, narrative poems, concrete poems and comic verse, and poems occasioned by the impress of landscapes and seascapes, or particular encounters and events. The poems form the first part of Graphologies (Forthcoming from Mica Press) and accompany a sequence of paintings by my partner Jean McNeil.
One of the poems is reproduced below:
Ulysses in translation
On the beach at El Penio
where once Phoenicians and Moriscos danced
he works the line of parasols
around his head a halo
of tobacco smoke, in his hair
canaries flutter and glint
On his chest the sign reads
God Is Great. On his back
a map of Africa proclaims:
‘The Future is closer than you think’.