Drifting Down the Lane

This is a wonderful new anthology of poetry and art put together by editors Agnes Marton and Harriette Lawler. It's based on the children's game Whisper Down the Lane, or as we called it, somewhat worryingly perhaps, Chinese Whispers. The whispered secret is the Magnum Opus, the Great Work of alchemy, turning lead into gold. Each poet and artist had to interpret the secret how they wished, and the book is arranged as a chain of interpretations, quite brilliantly by the editors. Here's the link to the shop where you can buy either a hardback or a paperback copy. It's quite expensive but a fair price for a large coffee table book like this, where the art reproductions are really magnificent: Drifting Down the Lane.

I'm going to blog my poem here, but in actual fact it should be seen in context with a great piece of Cubist art, and alongside a sequence of poems by Andy Jackson, Andrew Taylor, Sarah Crewe and Ira Lightman, where a wonderful chain of meaning is created. Please buy the book. It's well worth the price and would make a great Christmas present. Thanks to the editors and all the poets and artists who contributed.

FIELD REACTIONS IN A CATALYST

Where I am, always where

rivers of breath, ribbed

by caution, daring, quotidian

homeostasis, soak the body rock

animistic, flight of pictographic captains

sucking back the hologram

to formative singularity, mulched

in low level dream delirium.

Eyes along a thread, glissando

quick to confluence of irrigated

radio waves, pig gut fluvial

spilled at bordering consciousness

breaks to calcify, purge, clarify,

surge of intuitive cloud gold,

radiance known as that,

shown no disconnection where I am.