And Six More Poems. By TIM DOOLEY. . The Cavalcantine Lure. A PRETTY FACE, the very heart of reason, the expert’s dry indifference to rank, the song of birds and lovers’ reasoning and boats lit all along the southern bank. Purest air; dawn’s first whitest hour and white snow falling where there is no wind, […]

Alan Wall: ‘Ovid’s long gone, breathing the salt wind of the blackest sea/Exiled to his outpost where the priests/All recommend a sacramentum of barbarity./Write (if you must) with old coals on the dungeon walls.’

Martin Stannard: ‘Soon after I moved in here I put my name down for the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme because I have no desire to be burgled by burglars or otherwise invaded. Long story short, on my first tour of duty I was taken in for questioning by the police as a result of the lady at number 48 phoning in to report a Peeping Tom.’

Linda Black (from the afterword): The prose poem may stray from the point, cavort around, take in the scenery, but will continue to serve the central focus. Often non-linear, it allows for the discontinuous or compressed narrative, the associative leap, the fragmentary, the tangential. Predicated on the sentence, rather than the poetic line with its considerations of line endings, the prose poem encourages thoughts to be continuous, to twist and turn, hold themselves up short, or open out into a broader perspective, sometimes travelling at great speed.’

David Hackworth Johnson: ‘The feet of nightmare fugues pursue your own journey those nocturnals in leafy shadowed streets where you have been told she now lives and if only you can find the house she will be at the gate haloed in jasmine.’

Kelvin Corcoran: ‘You must go there to set the poem aside. / They know everything about Helen there.’

Antony Rowland: ‘The whole sequence is, in a sense, a response to The Life of Charlotte Brontë, because Gaskell’s book merges acute observations of mid-nineteenth-century Haworth and its environs with questionable accounts of the wild, vicious natives: Gaskell is rightly accused of perpetuating the ‘Brontë myth’ of the parsonage family growing up in the forgotten wastes of outer Yorkshire.’