30th June, 2017

Friday Poem – ‘Waking in Picardy’, Graham Mort

This week we welcomed the publication of Graham Mort’s masterly tenth collection, Black Shiver Moss, and so today as Friday Poem we feature ‘Waking in Picardy’, the opening poem from this brand new collection.

New places are made familiar by the vivid descriptions and evocations in Black Shiver Moss. In ‘Waking in Picardy’ we see the intimacies of nature: ‘damselflies glisten, sex to sex/ promiscuously winged.’ Elsewhere in this startling collection, Mort moves us beyond the visible, towards spiritual and philosophical concerns. What really impresses is how Mort manages to create and sustain a darkly magnificent tone, reminiscent of Beethoven’s late quartets, of Shakespeare’s tragedies, of classical landscape painting, a tone suffused with seriousness and mortality.

Black Shiver Moss is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us