Sunday, 27 July 2025

Lays of Lost Thoughts

This book (available from that link as an online .pdf for free) by my late friend David Brookes is a phenomenal collection of poetry consisting of material written between 2016 and 2025. Before I talk about the book itself I want to talk briefly about David. He was a semi-regular attender of the spoken word night I host; I didn't know him as well as I would have liked but I liked him a lot. Softly spoken & articulate, considerate & generous, wise beyond his years & extremely easy to talk to however small or deep you wanted to go - he was a great guy and a much-valued part of our little community. So it was with great shock and sadness that I heard last month that he had taken his own life. I am publishing this post exactly a month after his memorial service. Heartbreakingly, mere days before he left us, he uploaded all of his work to his website as free .pdfs; alongside this poetry collection is a collection of short stories (which I aim to read very soon) and a monumentally ambitious five-part epic imagineering a lost mythology of the British Isles, complete with gods, monsters, heroes, and the like (which I will read at some point and which I thoroughly regret never having had the chance to talk to him about when he was alive, as it looks utterly fascinating); I urge you to check all of this out as David was a profoundly gifted writer.

   Which brings me to the book. All of the poems herein are free verse, and this collection is a dazzling testament to the power and profundity of that medium; contained within is also a breathtakingly marvellous breadth of expression. The poems range in theme from love & loss to the natural & cosmic to history & memory and more - I really struggled to select ones to mention specifically in this post as I could very easily highlight every poem in the book, but I've tried to limit myself to about 30-40% to leave a bit more wiggle-room for surprise when you go and read it yourself, which you absolutely should. In the opening few poems we get the bleary wanderlust of Where Were We followed by the tentative longing of Spools of Wool and the sheer wistful beauty of Listening to Your Recorded Presentation on Mortuary Practices in Medieval Byzantine Anatolia (which I read at our spoken word night in tribute to him after we'd heard the news). Then we get the simmering heartwrenching jealousy of There is a Burning Cold I Feel and passionate physicality of Yours Are Not the Cold Touches, the tender parasociality of The What That Happened to Brendan Fraser and even tenderer (if possible) silence of We Are Good at Looking at Each Other. After these, the blunt cynic realism of Paterson, and a delicious contrast between the indignant quietness of Look at You and the chaotic lovingness of The Riot of You. Then the demure nostalgia of Mosborough Moor and the detached pain of To the Marble in My Mouth, the familiar care of I Can't Help Her, the grimy determination of Scourhopeful gratitude of Rievaulx, and remembered adventure of Wild Swimming. Catching up to current events, Invasion is a sensitive expression of solidarity with Ukraine, following which is the ponderous brilliance of Jabberwocky Prayer (one of my favourites). Flea Bomb almost leaves you personally itchy - you definitely feel the residual guilt, while Gold White has a gorgeous blending of love and nature imagery, and then Playlist (a found poem constructed out of collaged song lyrics) displays a deft selective precision. The final section of the book is called Songs of Extinction, each poem dedicated to a species of animal that has gone extinct within living memory - so treated are the desert bandicoot, the gloomy tube-nosed bat, the laughing owl and western black rhinoceros. Tragically, the final poem in this section and indeed the whole book is titled Self-Portrait as Animal (extinct by choice), and functions as something of a poet's farewell letter to a world that has given all it can to make life worth continuing. Serious content warning to readers who get to the end of the book for that one as though it is a beautifully written piece it is also a heartbreakingly honest portrayal of anguish and annihilation.

   This is a difficult post to write, but I think it's probably the most important post I've ever written on this blog for the simple fact that David deliberately bequeathed his work unto the wider world before his departure, and it would be a tragedy if his memory were not kept burning as brightly as possible by sharing and enjoying and being inspired by the brilliance of that work. So please, if you have even the slightest fondness for poetry (and his style is as wide as it is deep - precise yet pliable, erudite yet never indulgently elusive); go download this book and read it at your leisure. And lest it not be said, be kind to one another. You never know the intensity of pain someone might be plastering a stable face over. I've been torturing myself with the thought that had I been just a bit friendlier or more intentional or encouraging I might have tipped the balance and David would still be living and laughing and breathing and writing. But I know from his memorial service that there were many people far closer to him than I who were far better positioned to be that kind of support and it still wasn't ultimately enough to assuage everything that pushed him to where he ended up. That said, we all walk our own roads and bear our own burdens, but company is always nice and is more often than not helpful in the struggle. So share, and listen, and love. Nobody makes the world a better place simply by leaving it.

Thursday, 10 July 2025

For the Emperor

This book is the first of three in the first* omnibus collection of Ciaphas Cain stories by Sandy Mitchell - I'm reviewing each novel in the omnibus in a separate post as that only seems fair (and boosts my numbers for blog purposes).  As I do with all series, I'll do brief posts for the first couple and then a longer more reflective post once I've finished this introductory trilogy.

   Alongside the titular novel is a prelude short story called Fight or Flight, in which we are first introduced to Cain (a commissar whose dazzlingly heroic reputation is very much at odds with the reality of his character as a cunning coward who just wants a quiet life with as little mortal danger as possible - however life in the Imperial Guard never seems to quite grant him this - an amusing subversion of the genuinely heroic nature of most other famous commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 universe**) as he is introduced to his new placement with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, assigned a smelly aide called Jurgen, and narrowly avoids being consumed by a tyranid incursion.

   The novel itself picks up a few years later, as Cain is newly placed as commissar to the amalgamated mixed-gender regiment of the Valhallan 597th and sent to the remote backwater world Gravalax where Imperial citizens have been trading, heretically, with the Tau Empire. War over such an insignificant planet is not deemed worthwhile by the Guard so this mission is, at first at least, primarily diplomatic; wanting the humans to stop, or at minimum reduce, their problematic relations with the alien races, in such a way as to avoid violence (all of which is very much fine by Cain) - a goal set straight from the Inquisition itself. However events conspire as to raise the stakes, and Cain finds himself at the heart of a shambolic mess of risk-whichever-way-you-turn, only for things to get less confusing but even worse safety-wise when a genestealer cult is discovered who have manipulating developments from underground (quite literally - the second half of this novel largely takes place in a tunnel complex). The resolution is more of matter of muddled luck than anything authentically courageous or clever, which I suspect is par for the course in this particular commissar's career. I look forward to the next instalment.



* At time of writing there are ten Ciaphas Cain novels and many short stories out, and while I have no doubt I would enjoy reading them they're very low down my priority list given how much else I have to read - within the same universe I'm going back to my focus on the Horus Heresy.

** Looking specifically at you, Ibram Gaunt. And I suppose Yarrick.