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.
 
*
 
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