Invitation

Do not wait for the table to be lit within, primed to glow with its currency of bread. Do not wait for the budding rose to burst under its own arrow-straight bent for rot. Call me today when the hard ray on the sundial, wavering between noon and hesitation, forces the pupil to pin drop small: the blue iris swelling to provide us a nest. Come lit and drunk on the thrill of the closing gap; the mix of wet, hot earth and bougainvillea pressing through the aching sandstone town. Come damp-haired and without your belt, your shirt smelling of sea salt and bottle in hand. Each tumbling piazza, each exhaust fume inhaled will be remedied by a world surrendered within four walls, between two lips. Let me make magnets of ripened hearts, tongues, fruit and fresh linen. Let no one but the river know. The door will undress itself of locks at your skin. Step over your quiet, shy morning; be as silk: a guest in my hands. Please, your head waits for a shoulder and not for a single bed. Take my bait. Just here: bite.

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The Calls is a collection that will make 'the hours dance through your iris'. Its sensational visual appliance of metaphor & image ping at your skin like a stretched elastic band. A book soaked in 'urban lore' & domestic dazzle; both loss & celebration. Poems which bewitch the mind into switching from language to film, kept hypnotised by the gorgeous Baroque style & painterly psychogeography; where the landscape is laced with spectre, where the minuscule is mapped, where life is discovered in close-up under the lens. You won't regret delving in...  – Janette Ayachi

In these beautifully achieved poems, at once inviting and haunting, Olivia Hodgson blends beguiling figurative and aural detail with a feel and appetite for mystery. Questioning and conjuring, The Calls possesses a rare poise, glitteringly at ease in its own unsettling energies. – Gregory Leadbetter