Blood feather

In ‘Blood Feather’, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost – while lost beyond recall. The first section, ‘Mother as Spy’ – a series of deeply moving poems about his mother, displaced between languages – investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. ‘The Cooling Towers of Didcot’ elegises today’s post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, ‘After the Flood’, links the book’s themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously.