There is a solitary witch in every wishing well

filling bucket after bucket with life’s blood.

This sequence of poems is based on the meditative practices centred around a journey my spiritual mentor, Jayne Johnson, undertook for me. In this journey, I was taken to an island and instructed to meditate within a ruined clochán.

- Look, this is how quiet I can be,

the child said to a star in the sky

The snake you mistake
For evil’s the same one
Who led us from Egypt
And freed us from Eden

expand our experience with this transient light

in our eyes, undisturbed in an infinite way

feeling safe in the dark,

knowing the intimacy of each night:

black feather to the cheek.

The silver coin in my cup

is the Moon cast small.

The slight blade in my hand

is learning to plough the clay,

sowing prayer and memory.

The first snowdrops pushing their heads up in my garden, emerging in the space of the few hours I'd been away. The evenings are growing lighter, the days lengthening steadily. Even amid despair, there is hope.

you were a spider busy with

consuming the prey, only to suddenly realize that the prey is a part of yourself.

The perpetual uncertainty of life in this world is given meaning through poems, and for that we want to venerate our poets.

This ended up functioning like a lucid dreaming technique, in which I would sometimes be awake and sometimes in REM sleep, and sometimes in-between the two. This poem is a record of the things I saw and heard on that long drive through the desert.

“I couldn’t help but feel that an epic character like my father deserved to be remembered in an epic way, so I composed this elegy for him about a year after he died.”

The city is haunted

by liminal shades that frequent

the empty bus station or unclaimed lot

Mountain panic appears to be an experience of the numinous, what Rudolf Otto calls ‘the terrible and fascinating mystery,’which he saw as the origin of all religion.

“In every word we breathe we bring the Void- the utter zero of its depths unseen, the sum of worlds it swallowed and destroyed: dead myths and fables, fallen gods and dreams.”

“He met me somewhere on a dark beach and told me the secrets of the land of the dead before he was called away…”

“This poem is a variation on the story of True Thomas or Thomas the Rhymer, a Scottish poet who was said to have been given the gift of prophecy after a tryst with the Queen of Elphame. In this updated version of the story, Thomas is not a medieval Scottish poet but a modern man, lying in bed unable to sleep as he broods about the past.”

The day always starts

with a specific fauna and flora

which is not up for discussion.

With this lack of names, of tradition, of relationship, how can we speak of moss?

This mossland will conquer its bounds / growing millimetre by millimetre a year…

The cycle cannot be escaped;

All there is to do is coax out words and coat

The atavistic sorrow