The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay - all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates.
Traversing the broken, collapsed, eroded stones, looking for voices that express the damaged and the damned, Asylum pays homage to the darkness of the human cave: its memories and ancient histories, and to its more contemporary signals - internationally owned quarries, abandoned coal mines, decommissioned Cold War bunkers.
The Birds and the Bees series was designed for Vintage Classics by Timorous Beasties, the Scottish studio famous for their designs inspired by the natural world Bee Journal is a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive. It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 T. S. ELIOT POETRY PRIZE