@severaldeer
Only a rhymester. Home to My Cats (April 2026) w/ @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social; Several Deer & The Culture of My Stuff w/ @carcanet.bsky.social; Girton Time w/ Beam Editions. Bye-Fellow, @girtoncollege.bsky.social. SF, TTRPGS, lemurs. He/him.
Kirsten Irving calls it 'deliciously strange and sincere'; James Womack calls it 'beautiful and sensitive'; like my previous collections, it has a gorgeous, could-be-iconic cover design; I promised the cats I'd make them famous. So: preorders, please. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...
Some of the Swift allusions are so quiet I’ve forgotten what they are; they were ways of guiding phrasing or vocabulary rather than explicit engagements with her songs. Some are more flamboyant. Only one is as good as ‘I shake a blank space off the page’.
The Swift thing started as a silly inflation of the already silly idea of me, arguably not the most commercial of poets (but WHY?), writing something as mercenary as cat poems; why not just make them Taylor Swift poems while I'm at it? But then it added texture, and upped the joy factor immensely.
There are indeed plenty of sonnets, and one villanelle (which is more than enough); also more free verse than you’ve any right to expect from me (i.e. a small quantity), and other formal dabbling. Loads of ekphrasis, some D&D, and inevitably Leonard Cohen. Plus, yeah, many, many Taylor Swift nods.
‘Say something about the cats while ideally dropping a Taylor Swift allusion’, applied over and over, offered the same sort of dynamics and energy as ‘write a long skinny sonnet’ or ‘write a one-sentence villanelle’.
The pamphlet marks a shift in my relationship with subject matter, which I’ve tended to treat as secondary to form. I realised I could treat subject matter *as* form, which is to say as a set of generative protocols rather than some tedious announcement of an insight or stance.
They’re also love poems to poetry, paintings and pop music. Cats are poems. The world’s a toy. Swifts are songs. Cats are tailors.
I love some rich Empsonian irony in my reading and writing, but for those who found my two collections overinclined to the second guess and the shorted circuit, here you go, losers: an utterly sincere book of joyful domestic love poems addressed to two entirely real, named animals.
I wrote these poems between spring 2023 and spring 2024, in the first year of living with my two cats. Part ‘Pangur Bán’ for Swifties, part Jubilate Agno with more poo jokes, this is a book in which I try to explain poetry to the cats, and the cats to myself.
*yawns*
*stretches*
I have a new book on the way! Home to My Cats, a chonky pamphlet of poems about (as the title might suggest) kittens and Taylor Swift, will be published by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social in April 2026, and is available to preorder.
www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...
Michael Longley's gone. This will never do.
Eight lines of free verse. 'You are flint where the bitch-cat whelps under desert rock, or spume when brine-water sickens with sea-spawn, you are the kindless issue of the twin gulfs – storm-ridden Syrtes – of the octopus and maelstrom, epitomes of ruin.'
It's long been a Catullus-via-Peter-Whigham word for me. (Thanks, posh Belfast grammar school!)
I thought I’d have to miss this, but I’ve made some rearrangements and will be there for almost all of it!Please don’t say anything very important in the final four or five minutes.
I took it as a positive that, when exploring last weekend, I searched ‘paul muldoon’ to take the temperature and found this recent cutting from my @pnreview.bsky.social interview with him. 2015. I wasn’t even born.
bsky.app/profile/john...
A week in, this appears functional. I’m seeing cats and jokes and poems, and also sentences.