Books

• Ephemeris, (Nine Arches Press, 2014)
• Places of Articulation, (dancing girl press, 2014)
• Umwelt, (Leafe Press, 2016)

 
prattle
 
adduce some                        y bound
turned into arship,
a little              substrate in you,      by dissent
terms afford two moments
children, not unlike the adults we'd become
            born to imitate speakers
impoverished vernacular   
             grasped by   pith linguist
       by saying that a person is deadline
bound to limitation               if reported                 
still speaking             how spectre, how death of tongue                       
 
leaves paraphrasing alone
antiquity         spoken to be put down
            naturally forced to confront
            elusive           in the morning
by bed we favour                
 
are you leaving as the song suggests
leave then,  no acoustics in fact
            heirs
will reminisce                       
wipe away     halcyon
all very well  
            aren't you missing your
 
animal
 

Umwelt begins with a strong sonic and rhythmic surge into the abyss of the traumatised body with ‘verbal machinery annexed’ as ‘the body still roams’ and ‘is a throne of abuse’ delineating a split between body and speech. There is a clash between an impersonal use of medical language, as in ‘social pleasures rely on the pineal gland’ or flowing backwards / from the alveolar ridge’ and the implied problems of dysfunction, and a personalised anger leading to a ferocious rant with witty asides. This clash of register is at the heart of the poem’s momentum and success. The poem is both personal and impersonal, being imbued in medical language, emotionally and linguistically powerful as shifting attitudes and understanding of the self and the body’s condition change over time. This produces a powerful testimony, as it is both detached and emotionally charged. -David Caddy

"Ephemeris is a stellar nursery for new poetic formations to address our changing perceptions: here, the stars simultaneously twinkle and are giant gas clouds. Renewing lyric's hunger for discovery, for the edge of making and unmaking, they are doubly experimental, yoking Albert Einstein's particles and Gertrude Stein's participles. These poems are colliders as much as star charts: Schröedinger texts, they effect what they document in their 'lexis, praxis… nexus… flux.'"– Sophie Mayer

"Ephemeris is a ‘diary’ or day-book, more accurately the Greek word of which the Latin word for ‘diary’ is a translation. Ausonius wrote around 380 AD a poem called Ephemeris describing a day of domestic routine hour by hour. One folio seems to be missing. More locally, it is an astronomical table for determining the position of a heavenly body on a given day. Swim-suit, space-suit. Seismic waves of deviance/ tongue-tied miasma, Dorothy Lehane’s book of this name is an extended metaphor in which the course of a heavenly body through the sky draws after it shifting experiences, in an organism susceptible to the influences of heat and light." - Andrew Duncan