Four Poems (and an Announcement)

Hello friends,

I am delighted to announce that my KNIT INK tetralogy of books — STRAY ARTS, THE UTU SONNETS, SLATE PETALS, and THE NOSON SONNETS — will be published this September in a single omnibus edition!

The book is being published in paperback by the multi-award-winning Deep Vellum, and can be pre-ordered on their website.

There will also be an audiobook version, which I am in the process of completing.

This week, four poems — one from each of the KNIT INK books:

UTU (Univocalic Palindrome, The Utu Sonnets)

Utu,
sun rubs us.
Dusk cuts.
Dumb mud, stuck, suds us.
Burn us, Utu.... 

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WAVESCAPE (Aelinscape, Slate Petals)

A Shakespearean sonnet in iambic dimeter, which slices down its centre, forming two monometer sonnets (one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean):

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THE PRINTING PRESS (Palindrome, Stray Arts)

Repaper:

I snap, my tone placid.
A rare vellum knits art, no coil of fires....

Midst no felt tome,
we gape, we gage, we page,
we mottle fonts.

Dim serif, 
folio,
contrast,
ink,
mull ever a radical pen.
O, tympans! 

I repaper.

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And finally, a Shakespearean sonnet that uses only two vowels (a&e), which follow the pattern a-e-a-e-a-e... throughout the poem:

DANCERS AFTER DARK (Bivocalism, The Noson Sonnets)

A fearless darkness wakes arenas dead:
The pale and dear departed dancers pass
the graves that seal them. Lanterns blaze ahead.
The garden takes a breath. Death treads the grass.
 
The dancers dance as dreamers taste a dream
recalled: a meagre pattern scrawled — made fate.
As heavens waltz, the garden frames a stream:
entangled hazes faded hands create.
 
Lament attends a theatre after dark.
Weak heartbeats, less an extant flesh and helm,
are warmed at death’s exaggerated mark....
We dancers dance, abreast the lake and elm.
 
That wreath, the darkness, asks we stand, redrawn,
then fall, the spark erased at beaded dawn.