Poem: Components (via link)
November 11, 2025
If you go to this link, you’ll find a poem I just had published at the venerable AntipodeanSF, called “Components”. It involves a horse and cart, which allows me to use that wonderful illustration by Phiz, of a scene from Dickens’s David Copperfield.
The poem is about routine and magic, and is rather long, by my standards. But by no means Dickensian.
Poem: The Angel of the North is pissed off
August 4, 2025
Stretching those flat brown wings
it regards the wattle, sings
its songs from Tyne and Wear
wonders how things are up there
and how it came to Canberra
in the wrong hemisphere, a
flight of seventeen thousand k.m.
and whether it’ll wing home again?
away from pesky cockatoos
and a sky too often unmarked blue
with insufficient sludge and rain,
and heat to fry a maquette’s brain.
It spits copper spit from unseen mouth.
Poor Angel! To be transported South.
PS Cottier
A bit of silliness for this week.
A maquette of the Angel of the North stands in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The poem is unseasonal, as it’s very cold in Canberra at the moment, much colder than where the big angel spreads its wings.
Photo by Picnicin. Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication
Poem: Sand cycle
February 3, 2025
Sand cycle
The sand stretches,
flexes its muscles,
and I am stuck, Goya’s dog,
pulled down,
waking in a different world.
Another world of sand.
I shake and try to pull myself
to a firmer edge. There is no edge,
and I suffocate, and wake again,
stranded, lungs filling, sinking.
I am trapped in an hourglass,
never emptying, dry drowning,
reborn on repeat, reversed
Sisyphus on the beach,
with ten million tiny rocks
pushing into ears and mouth and nose —
feldspar and silica and an
endless choke of grinding quartz.
PS Cottier
Well that’s a miserable poem for my first on the blog for 2025! Many people have had nightmares about being trapped, or suffocating, and this poem attempts to capture that feeling of dread.
In more cheerful news, another review of The Thirty-one Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella co-written by NG Hartland and myself can be found here. The reviewer is Tim Jones.
(Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson)
Tuesday poem: The paisley pitbull
December 11, 2024
Each bark is Mozart sweet. Silver flutes
are nothing to the improvised flow
of furry sax buried in soft-toffee bay.
His teeth are crochet hooks. Bites bloom
into perennial tattoos, scars in winter
flutter into hollyhocks come spring.
The cat and the kid eat from his bowl,
sip his milk and crunch his kibble,
and the robin plucks hairs for her nest.
He turns three times three before rest,
and apostrophic patterns erupt
as the canine chameleon settles.
Nightbulls may gore; Pamplonas
still run through his veins,
ghost-genes there in blood’s bottle.
But paisley outs. Stretching into dawn,
he shakes off hard history like dew,
and noses, bee-soft, into day.
PS Cottier
This is an old poem, which first appeared in my chapbook Quick bright things: Poems of fantasy and myth (Ginninderra Press, 2016). The dog in the picture was only six back then; now she’s nearer to fifteen.
The poem touches on myths about pitbulls, which can be as affectionate and gentle as any other breed of dog.
Tuesday poem: Sun hunger
November 11, 2024
Sucking in a sun a day,
my appetite is never sated.
My gut remains deeper and darker
than any Mariana Trench.
I stuff myself, gorge and cram,
but can never expel. Once in my jaws,
well, that’s it. Solar systems
are everyday entrées, mere moons
never elicit a burp. Creatures tiny,
creatures huge, on planets I eat,
I clench on them and chew.
I put the die in diet, the ease
in squeeze, but purest light
is my favourite meat.
I store a glowing disc of suns,
hot hors d’oeuvres or tapas,
awaiting my gourmand’s mouth.
Remember my sun-lust,
the tens of thousands of meals,
the gaping wolf of nevermore.
Enjoy the summer warmth,
the waves and sandy, beachy mirth.
Play that game of cricket.
But overs may be more limited
than players ever expected.
Any sudden burst of cold
may be my nugatory tongue,
about to end both grief and fun.
PS Cottier
Source: https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/monster-black-hole-devouring-one-sun-every-day
Recovering from two launches, I thought I’d post a new poem of a scientific sort, or at least one taking science as a jumping off point.
PS Cottier 