ISBN: 9781915108166

Publication Date - Thursday 7 December 2023

Tom Walker

[A] time of paper credit speculators light cigars with government bills cut about with pocket knives, to test the depth of fat dreams of Mar-a-Largo in their eyes.

Old Tom Walker went out to the woods names of rich colonialists carved into the trees dropped a couple of holes to keep things friendly won himself a share in Bill Kidd, the Pirate’s treasure all for the right price, of course

a house, a car & a new career in television a dead woman’s heart & lungs wrapped up in an apron an unkindness of knives that twisted in his mouth Brioni suits, cut wide across the shoulder finasteride & cold-cream on a polished truncheon getting the help to cinch him into a leather sling

lived in mortal terror of the collection plate his best horse buried in its saddle, upside down one bible in his pocket, another on his desk when the TV cameras came by looking for a story, he cried ‘the devil take me, if I have made a cent’

you fell on him like a brigade of lightning stuffed a thousand Georgia ballots in his mouth dragged him off behind a Pontiac Firebird left a ragged smear of laughter on the wind.

Time to get acquainted with your demons. In the poetry of CD Boyland, they appear in years, days, algorithms, doubles, sickness, fossil fuels and factories. We travel back in time to ‘The Tavern’ where ‘Marlowe & Goethe’ shoot daggers at each other and disagree about the fate of Faust. We are called to listen. This collection trades in seven sins: one being the lust for ‘candid selfies’; another being ‘sloth’, the sin of ‘lying like a snowdrift up against everything’. Boyland’s poetics metabolise the mythical, hymnal, apocryphal, pornographic and carnivalesque forces of coal-powered modernity into the entropy of ‘unforgiving techno’ and ‘erewhon’. Variously, they take up space or dissipate. I can’t help but linger by the sirens. I want to sleep ‘peacefully / beneath a sea-bed alive with the calligraphy of coral’. Boyland makes space for nature to rewrite itself. This is a work of desire, refusal and ardent storytelling. Imagine Yeats organising a choreography of wolves. Hell’s villanelle is around the corner. —Maria Sledmere

This collection showcases a fierce intelligence at full tilt, ranging across a mirror-world where Marlowe and Goethe hurl insults across a pub table, algorithmic Faustian pacts are cemented between characters locked in eternal conflict, and an ever-expanding collage of texts pulls the reader into a web of unsystematic belief systems. Boyland is a writer of sensual terror and delight, formally inventive, and unafraid of how constraint informs creative freedom. Immerse yourself fully in this world and prepare to be unboxed. —Samuel Tongue

Mephistopheles by CD Boyland

Name: Mephistopheles by CD Boyland
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Prologue in Heaven
[I]n the name of the Father unbothered by their blasphemous levity, stepping down from the heavenly sphere they meet up for a drink

Jesu raises a glass mindful of wounds in palms not to bleed on His white robe St Michael’s spear propped carelessly beside the open door

universal English faces more human than divine, by order exchanging pre-Babylonian banter beneath their table, the Devil writhes & begs for scraps, gets nothing

Other punters in the bar mindful of their mortality keep a nervous distance wary of light unapproachable how men, being life-size only are all too easily trodden beneath their saviour’s feet.

*

The Bell
[T]ake out your eyes, this is for your own good & ours

We are agreed, you & all of us, all of us & you, that this is the right thing to do

Imagine a clock, its hands turning, hours passing – though you can no longer see
– all is well – its hands still turn, the hours still pass

– & now that you are blind, we have added more hours to the day

– now that you no longer need the light, all the hours of the night will be the day & all the hours of the day will be the day as well

This is the bargain that we made, the cracked bell that we have struck –

these are our last words on the matter & if they are not, then those words will be the last

– what matters is that we stand together, all of us & you, you & all of us, & go as one

– into the darkness.
CD Boyland is a poet, visual poet, and editor who lives in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow. His pamphlets are User Stories (2020); Vessel (2022); SMC_ (also 2022) and Ptchdk_ (2023). Other work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as: 3AM Magazine, Beir Bua, Gutter, The Interpreter’s House, The North and New Writing Scotland. He is a Trustee of the Edwin Morgan Trust and also co-edits The Glasgow Review of Books.

Mephistopheles by CD Boyland

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