My third collection, ‘High Nowhere’ was published on 24 November – and you can buy a copy just here.

I am so happy to see this book make it into print. It’s been three years plus in the making, so I was putting it together during Covid too. High Nowhere is about weather, and creatures, and place. It’s about how we live on the edge of climate disaster – and through pandemics.  I invented ‘High Nowhere’ as an imaginary placename, a marker for what’s at stake.  (I was plodding up a steep hill in the Welsh Marches when this thought came to me). And at the core of the book is a journey I made in Iceland during the Covid years. Also there are my black and white photographs throughout. Sometimes they relate quite evidently to the poems. Sometimes they stand at an angle to them. I am so grateful to Ronnie and Dawn at IDP for enabling photographs in this collection – which did add to their workload.

Translation 2 : troll
inland of the black ash plains and grazing horses
by the long crumpled fields of lava, the trolls
walk in darkness to measure the land, squelch
its names into its floods, turn their arses to its rain
crouched on scarps they lurk the hairy night, and now
and then one fatally mistimes the dawn, stiffens into stone

I saw Iceland in the company of Þrúður Helgadóttir, a friend who happens to be an Icelandic geologist, to whom great thanks. She drove us around lots of southern Iceland – and helpfully stopped the car when I spotted the troll, so I could spring out and get a photo. Not that he was going anywhere. Obviously.

Throughout the book are the High Nowhere poems, which suggested themselves from the start, and evolved into a form of their own. Here is the first one:

wood
In High Nowhere now the chiffchaff calls,
sap leaps and our red soil leans into south.

A din of rooks descends the air to strut
as black as beetles. The tatty wood lets out

its rusted ghost of parish tip, ramshackles
down a bank. Wild garlic leafs to cover it.

Special thanks to Penelope Shuttle and Robert Minhinnick, who provided such generous endorsements for the book.

I have some readings lined up already, but will be looking for more over the next 18 months or so, and also reviewers. Thank you for reading this – and to all my friends in the poetry community who’ve supported me, made astute suggestions – and who keep me going.