Communicator (communicator) wrote,
Communicator
communicator

Folklore by Tim Atkins

I bought a book of modern poetry called 'Folklore' by Tim Atkins from Salt Publishing, because I heard someone read from it at the Tin Angel, and I liked what I heard.

The poems are all broken up with punctuation (lots of full stops, missing some apostrophes for some reason). I think the purpose of this is to reflect the way consciousness is broken up into a collection of moments.

Sometimes I found the poems too hard to understand - particularly the very short ones didn't work so well for me. Too hard to grip.
Waken in. A plum stone.

Speaks into tables. With a handful of signs. Lays them on the same. Dreams of. Mends fences.

Breathing, sighing is a sign.

But mostly I thought they were vivid, intense (if, still, hard to understand). He reminds me a lot of Alan Garner - intense fleshy relationship with the land, the history of the land, working class men and women living in little houses on the edge of the wild land. But set in the Malvern Hills rather than Cheshire.

This for instance reminds me of Alan Garner a lot

(this is an extract from poem 7 - none of the poems have names)

This machine.

Inside night's clover. Beauty is. (But) it comes there.

Swifts circle the owl's house. But the owl is. Let down. If you break open her pellets, she reveals. Fieldmice, shrews. Voles even are buried there. In her eyes.

So we walk and the dirt road ends there. Suddenly. Why she stops and she cries.

Beneath the purple eaves. Light escapes through the cracks. To be lost there. Night lifts itself up and covers us until there is no air.

Where we were climbed there and her skin was all off & the flowers inside. Breathed in what & out silver. Pollen. hayseed. Smeared the dust in our lungs. Paints it all in. Before there was air there. Inside.

The moon is so empty now. We have left us with nowhere to go. Kissing is.

For good health wear bird's bones. In your clothes.

When you see a falling star say -

Actually as I read these and now type them I like them more and more.
Subscribe

  • Phew what a scorcher

    I see Gove has backed down on climate change and it's back in the curriculum again.

  • GCSE Computer Science

    My book is now for sale

  • LJ Settings

    At the moment I have set up this journal so that only friends can comment. I hate doing this, but I was just getting too much Russian spam.

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Comments allowed for friends only

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic
  • 4 comments