I’m taken aback by the endeavour of this book. It’s a work of rare and unfaltering ambition, an expansive tapestry of a book that threads together history, mythology, religion, suspicion and – most compellingly – an exploration of human character and pursuit pared of the anaesthetising skins of civilisation. The gift of it is that the poet has fused these disparate elements with such agility and immediacy of language. It’s an immersive joy to read that re-invites exploration by its surprises and narrative delights.

Allan Gillis, Professor of Modern Poetry, Edinburgh University

Pelagius, noted expat

Ha is home, an alter carved

from wind and wet on Britain’s bone

a sacrifice still shifting.

Our kinsman must have missed Rome

missed weight round his hem

atop his shoulders, chased Chrit’s

death-splinters overshore.

We’ll take it in hand, our own great clod

shall stand as church to this pleated prow.

This is an island god now.

A copse of our lost fathers

Yarrow grows in spades

five feet rows of power, ripped

no doubt from a fecund earth

bathed and splashed in our old blood.

Those there, the lying

to be twisted from root and wig and worm

they have traded names

lineage, senescence

for a guarantee, thought all the blades

that felled them fail to rust and dirt

when all is left but stone and frost

their dust will fall, pushed down

down from fertilising.

A thousand generations of trees

a million sons of yarrow seed

and they will be transformed

as a crypt of rippled green.

Cymru’s eastern acres

“It’s further than we thought.”

He said it with a loud laugh sunk

through mist-strewn heath.

Our braziers burned like old chaff -

like Brans eyes searing the path

across the ocean to his love.

He was searching for humour

in the darkling times

Yet each crag just reveals another.

Three oystercatchers

perch and prune their feathers.

They surely know something.

It is fixed in the poise of their wings.

Eel at the deli counter

My eyes don’t weaken with some

banal gyration of sky and earth

my bones do not quiver

to the stringy seam of time

my hunger drives the sun and moon.

That said, today will ba slow day.

Breastplates scattered

like shards of crab

some tasty meats are clinging

though them crows it seems

have had first dibs

I still have the option

of roman cheek

or sun-dried Thracian liver.

A tapestry gathering

No warp or weft from Europe’s hand

will serve our needs, our ornaments

are carved by Ogham prosodies. No

map compiled inside the balding pate

of some Latin clerk could aspire to grasp

our glisters, pin our bloodlines

to a song

What metre could do? When

mouths are still agape, whispers

bounced from untouched gums

grasping for community hymns

our father has forgotten.

A Ministry Of Light, Published by
The Candyman’s Trumpet £10