My pamphlet The Ghost Hospital — published by Maytree Press in 2019 — was shortlisted in the poetry pamphlet category of the Saboteur Awards 2020.
What I hope for these poems is that they create a voice for those who are not listened to. I am interested in exploring the human voice in extremis — those voices that go unheard, voices that are expected to stay silent, that keep things unspeakable. I am interested in the unsaid.
Thanks to Maria Isakova Bennett, Lewis Johnson and Zannah Kearns for the following reviews:
Lewis’s Review in Another North
Zannah’s review in Sphinx OPOIs
The Ward at Night
The women all want cigarettes.
Each of us has left the world,
electric light is low but never out.
The madhouse stripped of colour,
occupants drugged dull and duller
the mask of night is on my face.
The phone is full no breathing space
like messages, regrets
small change locked tight.
We line the corridors in disgrace.
The grave’s a fine and private place.
Like stations of the cross we wait, kowtow.
Blue’s a name for health and many songs.
All the people we used to know
illusions to us now.
Long gone exemplars of remembrance —
real, unreal, vision, dream — hidden in our shames;
for one, I made an imprint of her face
gathered in cloth, pressed after love;
rain falling on my shoe. A snowy dove.
Then, an attic prophet, I name my birds:
Baby, Periwinkle, Navy Knickers, Electric,
Pufnstuf, Cornflower, Catweazle, Cobalt,
Crystal Gayle, Sky Blue, Joni and Miles, Sleep-tight,
Mother’s Pride, Omo, Midnight.
from ‘The Ghost Hospital’ (Maytree Press, 2019) p.12
Burning Bright 
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