Thanks and a Happy Christmas to IT and Rupert; thanks also to Atlanta Wiggs for the illustration!

Read the poems here.

‘Static Gleanings’ by Tom Cowin – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘Buried Gods Metal Prophets’ by Maria Stadnicka – Guillemot Press ~ Here

‘Coronavirus Genome (Monolith)’ by Tom Phillips – published jointly by Plaugolt Satzwechsler and Timglast Editions ~ Here

‘The Hours’ by Gillian Clarke – Broken Sleep Books ~ Here

‘I Remember’ by Ian Seed – The Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘A crocodile, out of nowhere’ by James Roome – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘Santa Lucia’ by Charlie Baylis – Invisible Hand Press ~ Here

‘Eat Here, Get Gas & Worms’ by Steve Spence – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘From Fibs to Fractals. Exploring mathematical forms in poetry’ by Marian Christie – Beir Bua Press ~ Here

‘rhubarb’ by Tom Jenks – Beir Bua Press ~ Here

‘A Democracy of Poisons’ by Tim Allen – Shearsman Press ~ Here

…and Poetry Tweeted Appreciations/Recommendations (click on individual images to enlarge)

Go here for more

I think this is an extraordinary collection – a high-octane collage of ideas, soundbites, axioms, quotations, misquotes, lyricism, outbursts, narrative dysfunction and sudden apocalypse, comedy, bathos (comic and tragic) – which is to name, as they say, just a few. It is reflecting on a finite time of experience across an infinite refraction of it.

This rich range is contained but obviously not constrained by the framing as 100 prose poems of 28 lines across four stanzas each and I don’t think there is any particular rationale to the imposition of a form and finite number other than pragmatism. There could be, and one could make a case/argument, but why?

A wonderful tension/outcome is, however, how this pragmatism is exploded by the riff of random (or apparently so) thinking that occurs within its shaping. This is obvious in the consistent trajectories of thought and language, and within individual lines/phrases like ‘the shape of a forest is not the meaning of trees’.

I’ve pulled the above from 51. Work, so half way through the 100 poems, and this is where I will stop. I do so because saying more – from me anyway, now – would be the poison to perhaps corrupt what Tim Allen accomplishes in each and every poem (‘making us dizzy while coolly smiling’): the poison of over-analysis.

This poem speaks for itself so I simply celebrate its funeral cameo that Allen attends as ‘an unfinished work of temptation’ which I embrace as I haven’t finished reading – and I don’t mean from cover to cover – and I certainly don’t expect to ever reach an end.

(image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

With thanks to International Times – also for the Rrupert Loydell image: read poem and see complete image here.

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament —
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’
Idolatry of ideology

North south east west
Kill the best and buy the rest
It’s just spend a buck to make a buck
You don’t really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you’re going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

~ Bruce Cockburn
Call It Democracy lyrics © Rotten Kiddies Music Llc, Bro N Sis Music Inc., Bro N Sis Music, Inc.

The link to the Guardian AI article is here. A link to Edwin Morgan’s poem The Computer’s First Christmas Card is here.

(an appropriation and erasure)