Little Creatures - Poems of Insects, Small Mammals and Micro-organisms
My debut poetry collection, Little Creatures - Poems of Insects, Small Mammals and Micro-organisms, was published in 2013, though many of the poems were written long before that time.
The earliest pieces began life in the autumn of 2001. I had been walking home along rained-on streets, finding myself dodging snail shells on the pavement, which placed those animals squarely in my mind when I sat down to write that evening (though I seem to recall this writing took place not behind my desk, but sitting in front of the television eating tea - the urge to pour out my pontifications being far too strong to wait until a later hour.) I had been reading translations of Kafka's short stories, and the opening line of one - It is of a little woman that I now speak of - seemed to insist its way onto my page in zoomorphic form: I am thinking of the little creatures. And thus my Little Creatures poems were born.
LITTLE CREATURES
I am thinking of the little creatures:
the bugs and crickets of the night,
timid snails and unhurried slugs
inhabiting the bordered lands of people.
No difference the kings and queens,
no effect the interest rates,
a million blood-full massacres,
eternal slicing up of souls.
Where is their social welfare,
those who wind and scurry
through the concrete leagues
who crawl from wall to lawn and live
at the mercy of unprovoked claws?
The little mouse, the meek woodlouse,
crushed beneath the passing feet,
every day a civil war,
every night grotesque defeat.
Although I continued writing small creature related poems for some time, it was not until the summer of 2005 that the idea of a collection themed around insects and other small creatures took hold, having been struck by a number of poems on such subjects, not least Slug Wars by Maggie Butt:
Leaving their silvery signatures
every night over the breadboard
ghost-slime,
delicate calligraphy
messages from the hereafter
unfathomable as God
Tarantula, by Zimbabwean poet Musaemura Zimunya:
Your hands and legs - pedipalps - bend to your face
with the pain of the spray-bursts held so long
like a fire extinguisher.
How are you dead
when my ankles and my hind-arm
still echo my fears with aching burning?
and the majestic Dragonflies by Lynne Wycherley:
Summer sparks them,
a sun-dance on water,
brown nymphs rising
to slough off old coats
and hover
briht as lightning-rods,
glass filaments
catching the light.
Scarlet darters
and silver-green hawkers,
orange sympetrums
with burnt-metal hues,
damselflies lit
with a voltage of blue,
they flit in zig-zags,
the flash of their needles
sewing the land,
fen dykes, old wounds.
Wind-weavers, their wands
will wakeus. Catch
at the shadow-fringed
flow. of our thoughts.
Igniting us
with brief intensities.
At the time I lived in Leeds, near the verdant and wildlife-rich Roundhay Park, and returned home one morning after watching damselflies darting over the surface of a lake. Inspired by Lynne Wycherley's poem, I wrote the following:
DAMSELFLY
Split moon-fringe,
silk-slice
blue as threaded sapphire,
you haunt pond air
at July sunrise.
Floating flake,
like a breeze-blown vein
you come, half visible,
a slither of translucency,
disappearing into reed beds, invisible.
Over the next few years, I built up a repertoire of poems straddling the spectrum of the small, from well known characters such as spiders and flies, to remembered family pets, chance sightings, velvet mites, silverfish, and even the microscopic - the poem Littlest Creatures, for which I undertook researchwith the help of Leeds University, celebrates the world's smallest known animal, the tardigrade. Having never laid eyes on a tardigrade myself, I could only begin the poem on an aspirational note:
One day I'll glimpse you, filmy fragments
barnacled in viscid holograms of yourselves,
the tiniest of animals, the pin-stars burning
coldly against a boundless timeless sea of space.
Slugs seemed to inch themselves into prominent positions - three slug-specific poems making them the book's second most represented creature, after spiders - and it was not for nothing that, when later parading these poems on the readings circuit I earned the notorious nickname of "the poet of slugs and snails." The slug poems traverse a sticky line between unlikely (especially for a gardener) ecological advocacy:
These slurps of silver,
glycerine-click,
must be saved
to the gastro-eroticism of Slug Sex, inspired by steamy scenes in an episode of Springwatch:
...Shining in the moonlight,
they'll keep each other warm tonight:
lust-bulging bodies overlap like one big dollop of soft sloppiness
The eventual publication came in April 2013, Little Creatures being the inaugural title of my short-lived Caterpillar Poetry press.
I noted on the blurb that It has not been my intention to document all such life, and that in terms of my creepy, crawly and slippery speculations, this collection marks only a beginning. This remains so, and I will soon have more to add with regards to my continuing invertebrate investigations, but for anyone who has not read Little Creatures and would like to, I am delighted to say that copies are available in various libraries and book shops, with a stock of around thirty or forty still available to purchase from me directly.
Lesson
Half hidden in shadow
chasing past the wardrobe
the first was brown.
And big.
The second, crouched
in a corner at the top of the stairs,
was dark-spotted yellow.
Both harmless.
But spiders nonetheless.
The inconvenience of fear
came crawling through my blood.
Mum's despair was almost farcical -
it would happen with dad away from work.
Mal, the Welsh biologist
from over the way,
scooped them in a box
chuffed at such a double boon.
"He likes them," Mum explained.
"He looks at creepy crawlies for his work."
It had not occurred to me before
that such things might be beautiful.
The earliest pieces began life in the autumn of 2001. I had been walking home along rained-on streets, finding myself dodging snail shells on the pavement, which placed those animals squarely in my mind when I sat down to write that evening (though I seem to recall this writing took place not behind my desk, but sitting in front of the television eating tea - the urge to pour out my pontifications being far too strong to wait until a later hour.) I had been reading translations of Kafka's short stories, and the opening line of one - It is of a little woman that I now speak of - seemed to insist its way onto my page in zoomorphic form: I am thinking of the little creatures. And thus my Little Creatures poems were born.
LITTLE CREATURES
I am thinking of the little creatures:
the bugs and crickets of the night,
timid snails and unhurried slugs
inhabiting the bordered lands of people.
No difference the kings and queens,
no effect the interest rates,
a million blood-full massacres,
eternal slicing up of souls.
Where is their social welfare,
those who wind and scurry
through the concrete leagues
who crawl from wall to lawn and live
at the mercy of unprovoked claws?
The little mouse, the meek woodlouse,
crushed beneath the passing feet,
every day a civil war,
every night grotesque defeat.
Although I continued writing small creature related poems for some time, it was not until the summer of 2005 that the idea of a collection themed around insects and other small creatures took hold, having been struck by a number of poems on such subjects, not least Slug Wars by Maggie Butt:
Leaving their silvery signatures
every night over the breadboard
ghost-slime,
delicate calligraphy
messages from the hereafter
unfathomable as God
Tarantula, by Zimbabwean poet Musaemura Zimunya:
Your hands and legs - pedipalps - bend to your face
with the pain of the spray-bursts held so long
like a fire extinguisher.
How are you dead
when my ankles and my hind-arm
still echo my fears with aching burning?
and the majestic Dragonflies by Lynne Wycherley:
Summer sparks them,
a sun-dance on water,
brown nymphs rising
to slough off old coats
and hover
briht as lightning-rods,
glass filaments
catching the light.
Scarlet darters
and silver-green hawkers,
orange sympetrums
with burnt-metal hues,
damselflies lit
with a voltage of blue,
they flit in zig-zags,
the flash of their needles
sewing the land,
fen dykes, old wounds.
Wind-weavers, their wands
will wakeus. Catch
at the shadow-fringed
flow. of our thoughts.
Igniting us
with brief intensities.
At the time I lived in Leeds, near the verdant and wildlife-rich Roundhay Park, and returned home one morning after watching damselflies darting over the surface of a lake. Inspired by Lynne Wycherley's poem, I wrote the following:
DAMSELFLY
Split moon-fringe,
silk-slice
blue as threaded sapphire,
you haunt pond air
at July sunrise.
Floating flake,
like a breeze-blown vein
you come, half visible,
a slither of translucency,
disappearing into reed beds, invisible.
Over the next few years, I built up a repertoire of poems straddling the spectrum of the small, from well known characters such as spiders and flies, to remembered family pets, chance sightings, velvet mites, silverfish, and even the microscopic - the poem Littlest Creatures, for which I undertook researchwith the help of Leeds University, celebrates the world's smallest known animal, the tardigrade. Having never laid eyes on a tardigrade myself, I could only begin the poem on an aspirational note:
One day I'll glimpse you, filmy fragments
barnacled in viscid holograms of yourselves,
the tiniest of animals, the pin-stars burning
coldly against a boundless timeless sea of space.
Slugs seemed to inch themselves into prominent positions - three slug-specific poems making them the book's second most represented creature, after spiders - and it was not for nothing that, when later parading these poems on the readings circuit I earned the notorious nickname of "the poet of slugs and snails." The slug poems traverse a sticky line between unlikely (especially for a gardener) ecological advocacy:
These slurps of silver,
glycerine-click,
must be saved
to the gastro-eroticism of Slug Sex, inspired by steamy scenes in an episode of Springwatch:
...Shining in the moonlight,
they'll keep each other warm tonight:
lust-bulging bodies overlap like one big dollop of soft sloppiness
The eventual publication came in April 2013, Little Creatures being the inaugural title of my short-lived Caterpillar Poetry press.
I noted on the blurb that It has not been my intention to document all such life, and that in terms of my creepy, crawly and slippery speculations, this collection marks only a beginning. This remains so, and I will soon have more to add with regards to my continuing invertebrate investigations, but for anyone who has not read Little Creatures and would like to, I am delighted to say that copies are available in various libraries and book shops, with a stock of around thirty or forty still available to purchase from me directly.
Lesson
Half hidden in shadow
chasing past the wardrobe
the first was brown.
And big.
The second, crouched
in a corner at the top of the stairs,
was dark-spotted yellow.
Both harmless.
But spiders nonetheless.
The inconvenience of fear
came crawling through my blood.
Mum's despair was almost farcical -
it would happen with dad away from work.
Mal, the Welsh biologist
from over the way,
scooped them in a box
chuffed at such a double boon.
"He likes them," Mum explained.
"He looks at creepy crawlies for his work."
It had not occurred to me before
that such things might be beautiful.
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