Observe

AND, finally... a publication announcement!

I’d like to put the horse before the cart and start this post by announcing, semi-officially, that my first poetry collection, A Tentative Gardener’s Guide to the Evening, is finally coming out this March with Kingdom Anywhere! Details of the launch event, a first look at the book (and its gorgeous cover, designed by Augusta Sagnelli, with artwork from my long-time friend Agnes Treherne), as well as how you can pre-order through Substack, will be forthcoming very shortly. For now, I’d just like to thank everyone who has read, liked, commented, subscribed on here (and elsewhere - shout out to magazines who have published me and venues who have let me speak… it’s always a risk) and generally motivated me to keep writing poetry. I’d particularly like to thank my paid subscribers, whose subscriptions go towards the publishing and promoting of this book, and who will receive copies as part of their subscription. If you are able (and no one knows better than a jobbing poet that this is far from always being the case) you’d like to subscribe, support my writing financially, and receive a copy (at no extra cost), then it is of course not too late to do so - please just click below.

A Tentative Gardener’s Guide to the Evening is a work of observation - of the many nonhuman and human beings that inhabited my world, as well as climate change, and self-observation, over the five years from 2020 to 2025 where I quite literally tried to tend a garden for the first time. Many of the poems have appeared on here in some form or another, often not quite the same as their final form.

While times have changed, indeed are often changing too quickly and perhaps too much for my slow, if sometimes overexcited, soul (though in other ways, not enough, nor fast enough - such is one paradox of existence, perhaps) - and I am living slightly differently for now, in a different place, I think that the practice of observing remains central to my life, to my poetry, to how I connect back to the world of which I am a part.

Observe
A silence, a space
(Not nothing)
A swoop of rain
(Not a curtain)
Flushing thick purple
Between irregular parallels
Twenty-first century construction
This street’s
Quasi geometry, proximity to whiteness effaced
Besmirched
Smatter splatter
Evergreen leaf and ephemeral excrement
Unclean rains
Uncleaned streets

Fur bunched low, dripping
His primary sense heightened
(My dog)
Scents revealed to linger or urinate upon
Stunted iris
Rotting cacti
The street floods with treasures
Naturalised parakeets screech through it
I sniff
(No canine capacity)
Attempting to discern pine
Through the fumes
So close
Open field and scrub and vine
Shrouded and scarred
Trunk roads and shortcuts
Corrugated iron shopping shacks
To service this edge world
Sharp and resolute

This jutting
into which

I encrust myself
I entrust my companions
(No cushion)
Walls and beeping and grill-fence
(No veil)
The laurel and the fig tree
Lean and twist on the terrace
Just enough rain
(Not enough sunlight)
For physis less fraught
Than the watcher’s