Ur-blue; The water-halt; Bucko in love; The pitch-dowsing

Location: 'Ur-blue,' Poetry Review, 97:2, Summer 2007, pp 36-37, ISSN 978-1-900771-53-5; 'The Water-halt', The Warwick Review, I:I, March 2007, p54 (no ISSN). 'Bucko in Love', The Warwick Review 1:3, November 2007, (no ISSN); 'The Pitch-dowsing', The Warwick Review 1:3, November 2007, (no ISSN).
These poems are the first four poems to be published from my next book, provisionally entitled The Thunder House, which is an extended study of the grief at the death of a brother. Grief—either expressed or unexpressed—is the focus of the book, which extends into the psychodrama of family and moves towards a notion of evolutionary psychology. 'Ur-blue' is both a study in colour and an elegy for my late father: it attempts to project all gradations of blue through a filter of half-expressed grief. 'The Water-halt' is in many ways a traditional sonnet and yet attempts to touch the "freezing, terrible kiss" of farewell. It marries together traditional form with demotic language. 'Bucko in Love' takes the hapless canine as the residuum of a problematic family's love, need and ambivalence. 'The Pitch-dowsing' looks at the manner in which the ageing matriarch learns to edit what she hears in order to protect her own self-image. These poems are distinctive for the manner in which they combine emotional directness with simultaneous distancing, and continue the experimentation with the sonnet begun in To the God of Rain.