Sea Daffodils

First line of poem

Because the book that has your photo
says you’ll die tomorrow, here I am
hooked on your single day’s extravagance.
For this is the way we ride the dune,
bareback with tilted trumpets, lost for music
and knowing we’ll never hear it again
that pale arpeggio of geese pulling south
to one long note diminuendo. Because
there’s broken glass left and right, and ants
are heading my way over the sand,
I lean into your cool white space and breathe
a faint kindness. So it is, once again,
the immensity of existing things
rooted here in an exclamation,
six girlish sepals leaning back to laugh.
There’s hardly time to understand
the hilarity; already yesterday’s has trailed off
to meet its shadow. And something irrepressible
is bulging at the base of withered stems,
the risqué joke I’ll never get
though no doubt it’s to do with tiny headstones
thrusting through your bleached sprawl of leaves.
Busy being born, busy dying,
fugitive perfection on a barren shore, you
wrench from the guts an answering cry,
autumn, autumn, autumn.
 

These visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into lamplight in ‘Moth’, the poems are on the wing, ‘sourcing the radiance of things’ in response to the dark. A lost notebook inspires a sequence that interweaves themes of sea, music, memory, love and the charge of language. This is a distinguished first collection.