pete donohue: new midnight sky (2023) Front cover John D. Robinson
There is a great variety of poems amongst the 15 in this chap by the UK poet Pete Donohue. In the opening titled poem, ‘new midnight sky’ Donohue creatively humps the alphabet through an enlivened statue to reveal a sense of hope at the bottom of his spun-out barrel:
new midnight sky
one illuminated evening
this statue sheds its stasis
becomes alive again
for reasons only known
to herself
bending burnt spoons
between those bony thighs
into impossible re-use
like rusting cars crushed
at the local breaker’s yard
she crunches up syringes
with rotten gappy teeth
behind thin blooded lips
& spits out fragile shards
to form nascent stars of hope
surrounding a gibbous moon
the frolicking humpback mother
spread out across the canopy
as warm protective blanket
in her new midnight sky.
I dig best Donohue’s cast of wayward souls represented in his character poems. The personified ‘erotic wine’ bottle is a classic study in minimalism.Cheerful too is ‘stylish annabella’:
she wears tight woollen dresses
hair shirts in black
never any underwear
between those & skin
sharing every outline
of bony flesh
to the judgemental
naked to all
Best in the collection is perhaps ‘psychobilly baby’. I like how Donohue telescopes time and compresses images in this tragic, character study:
psychobilly baby
he never smoked hash with us
told us he didn’t like the way
it made him feel
or think
said he had a small habit
with smack
but was on top of it
his mother & sister
died in a car crash
when he was younger
he wouldn’t speak about it
we admired his drape jackets
& the way he walked through the night
all over london
loaded up on speed
he printed a mean silkscreen
fashioned wax in a candle shop
when we eventually found him
in his shepherd’s bush basement
he had been dead three days
the needle limp in his arm
i lit one of his candles.
Gwil James Thomas: Gold Chains Around Our Necks, Hellhounds At Our Heels (2022) 22 pages
Thomas lives in Bristol but some of his best work draws on his years in Spain. There are 20 poems in this chap, including 3 haikus, some of which have previously appeared in small, alternative publications such as Terror House Magazine, Rye The Whiskey Review, Expat Press, The Bees Are Dead and others. His poetry characteristically is free verse, narrative and confessional in style. These are honest, original one-off poems, wrought out of the beautiful but sometimes fucked up cauldron we call life.
Here are two of my favourites from the collection. Posted with the permission of the publisher. Click to enlarge:
The Woman Who Loved Floppy Hats (14 pages)
John D. Robinson (words) & Danny D. Ford (illustrations)
This is a hilarious, explicit romp into a young woman’s bedroom antics and her peculiar sexual hat fetish. The story is clearly told and unfolds in an interesting and highly entertaining way.
Danny D. Ford’s four illustrations add humour and bonk to Robinson’s inventive frolic.
The short story first appeared in the e-zine ‘Horror Sleaze Trash’ and was later published in Robinson’s collection The Dirty Sacrifice & Other Stories (Alien Buddha Press, 2021).
The story begins simply and graphically and entices the reader to continue:
Loretta Blissful was a very attractive and sexy twenty-seven-year-old and had an untamed and insatiable appetite for the opposite sex. She had been married and divorced nine times; a commitment to just one man was impossible for her.
One man was never enough.
Loretta liked to think of herself as a sexual vampire with an unquenchable thirst for cock. No matter how deeply Loretta’s love for each of her nine husbands, she could simply not resist the urge, the opportunities, the lust to pursue other men for sexual conquests and adventures. She simply could not help herself; her passion was her demon and she loved her demon well.
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