The evocative power of poetry is well-suited to the uncanny, the macabre, the gothic, and the unnerving. This year there's been some excellent offerings from the world of dark poetry, and if you're looking for some twisted seasonal reading as the nights get darker and colder, this small selection is for you...
WITCH
Rebecca Tamás's incredible tour-de-force is an explicit reclamation of the image of the witch, in turns subversive, dark and strangely humorous. Packed full of hexes and spells, Tamás follows the titular witch on a journey through the corners of history, of modern life.
...the devil tried to show thewitch how to becomeinvisible but that was a really hard one that was going totake her a while to get rightthe devil had a lot of books with him which he kept
stuffed in his underwear drawera mix of things like the bible told backwards and generalworks of contemporary literatureso the witch could read all of that when she wasn’tpractising how to change the weatherby sucking on a spoon of honey and dog hair...from WITCH AND THE DEVIL
The Gaelic Garden of the Dead
Described as a 'Samhain of unexorcised historical memory' by David Wheatley, MacGillivray opens this astonishing collection in no uncertain terms:
I open with a mouth of burning coal,burst from the bitter bone of my skullso suicides will come down to drink.from 'First Witness: Sweetness of Fire'
Kingdomland
In her reading for the PBS Spring showcase this year, Rachael Allen told us that among the influences for Kingdomland is the american horror writer Thomas Ligotti. His nihilistic otherworlds, described as 'philosophical horror', are keenly mirrored in Allen's dark and compelling collection.
The dark village sits on the crooked hill.
There is a plot of impassable paths towards it,
impassable paths overcome with bees, the stigma that bees bring.
There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive.
There is an impassable knowledge that your eyebrows bring. Beside the poor library
and the wicker-man, there’s a man who sells peacock feathers on the roundabout,
they scream all night from where they are plucked.
The village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate.
from 'Kingdomland'
Here also are references to folk-horror ('the wicker-man'), the rendering of what should be the pastoral and the provincial into something altogether more disturbing.
You can purchase Kingdomland here.