ISBN: 9781915108166
Publication Date - Thursday 7 December 2023
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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.
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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
