The pleasures of choosing a book cover

Very, very excitingly, the publication of my first collection from Oversteps Books draws closer... With a bit of luck it'll be out in time for my reading at StAnza International Poetry Festival in March.

I'm very fortunate in knowing so many talented artists, and Silvana McLean has most generously allowed us to use her work for the front cover.  It's a painting in gesso with oil glazes called 'Equilibrium'.  Its intense colour, Silvana's trademark sense of texture and depth and the extraordinary strangeness of the scored stacks and perfect coil of the balanced, floating shell all made it irresistible to me.

The book is called 'Not Lost Since Last Time', and this is the title poem, and why I wanted this image so much.  Thank you Silvana.


Not Lost Since Last Time

The borrowed pony, round as a rolling sea,
walks willing, for once, plodding the boom
of breakers down a sheeptrack.

Reins loose through fingers and gut jarred softly
by hooves, a child riding between leather
and sky, slack and absent, her thoughts

coiled in her grandmother’s shell
on its dusty sill, in not its native land.
The shell’s still curled round this green morning

when, young and sudden, a fox is on the path,
giving its absolute attention, and not afraid.
The fox, the pony, the sheeptrack,

the stones steeped in the fell below
this red-brush moment’s contact
between wild, and not-wild.

The child watching and finding
that she was all of them
and not them either.

*
Still it sits like a small red god on the sheeptrack,
ears cocked. It turns up again in the ribcage,
an expanding red-brush moment’s joy

at being all of them, and not them;
like holding the shell, fat weight in the hand,
and checking that the sea’s inside, not lost since last time.