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)
Rhysling nominations: ‘Mouthing off’
March 25, 2021
Very happy that two of my poems have been nominated for the Rhysling Awards, which are annual awards for the best speculative poetry published in the previous calendar year. The award is organised by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, based in the United States. Poems are nominated by members of the SFPA (but you can’t nominate your own poems) and published in The Rhysling Anthology. The editor of this year’s anthology is Alessandro Manzetti. Members vote for their favourite poems in two categories. This week’s poem has been nominated in the short category. I think you can guess that the other poem, which I’ll post next week, is in the long category!
Both poems nominated were published in my book Monstrous, Interactive Press, 2020. You can see all of the nominated poems here. Some of them can be read by clicking on the title. Very happy to see at least one other Australian poet there, Jenny Blackford, and Tim Jones, of New Zealand. Go Southern Hemisphere!
Mouthing off
She’s a shark, you know, a tiny one,
armed with milk teeth and coins.
She severs fingers, not legs,
hiding in lawnmowers, which she stops,
until an enquiring hand reaches
to unblock the green-clogged blades.
She strikes, starts the engine,
and the dumb machine gets the blame.
No-one sees her, flying off with the digit —
they mistake her sharp chortle for canaries,
the rattle of a hula hoop of surplus teeth
is heard as a cicada’s solo. She shimmies,
perched on a convenient tree,
and tucks into her well-earned, self-saucing snag.
Delightfully light, she flits on,
gathers a few more teeth, threads them,
bites a few puppies, enjoys the way
that the local pitbulls get the flak.
Her original teeth were removed long ago
in a futile attempt to stop her munching
on fingers, toes, and pets like candy.
She moved into kiddies’ teeth;
a penny there, then a dollar or a Euro.
She enjoys endless, free-market chomping,
glueing a new set every Sunday,
formed from that sweet, calcium-rich bandolier.
If a knife misses carrot
and finds flesh, it is surely
our invisible sprite who abbreviates the hand.
Carpenters have felt a sudden
blunting of their grip as ‘a chisel slipped’,
but the wound is surprisingly multi-edged.
A tiny rose of white thorn-petals removed
the formerly useful pointer, or mere pinkie,
if it was only time for a hasty snack.
Just recently, she has diversified,
depositing a few teeth into the ears
of the children who put them under pillows,
investing in her profession’s future.
They dream of fingers. They dream of wings.
PS Cottier
Zoom launch of Monstrous
August 5, 2020
Last Sunday was the Zoom launch of Monstrous, my new collection of horror poems. Thank you to the publisher, David Reiter for organising the launch, and to Tim Jones for the launch speech. Also thanks to those who attended, and those who helped with the book, especially Kaaron Warren for the Introduction. If you would like to have a look, the launch is now up on YouTube.
The book is available as a paperback or e-book at many on-line retailers, from the publisher, or, for those in Canberra, direct from me, or at Book Lore in Lyneham.
Tuesday poem: No streets, or maps to find them
October 18, 2016
It’s by link to Tim Jones’s site, where he posts a poem from my new chapbook Quick Bright Things: Poems of Fantasy and Myth. He also gives some commentary on the poem and the book, which is cool as a sea cucumber. (The poem is about a sunken city, hence the sea imagery creeping in there. Or sliding, or however sea cukes move.)
I was thinking of posting an appropriate Atlantis type image, but here instead is the cover of the book once again, with the cricketing fairy drawn by Paul Summerfield. You can buy a copy here.
Tuesday poem: Written Off by Tim Jones
September 12, 2016
Written Off
They had insured
and re-insured,
still it was not enough.
They hunched over maps,
consulted climate science.
Beachfront property
went with the stroke of a pen:
no possible premium
could insure that level of risk.
And floodplains:
why do people choose to build on them?
Bigger floods, more often: gone.
East Coast farmers, eyeball-deep
in debt, haunted by drought,
desperate to irrigate:
you backed the wrong horse.
Low-lying suburbs, factories
built next to streams:
there is no mercy
in insurance. The numbers speak,
and then there is no mercy.
Tim Jones
This poem is from Tim Jones’s new book New Sea Land, and deals with the effects of climate change in a particularly effective way, using deliberately simple language to describe a practical effect of rising sea levels. It will become impossible to insure all those ‘desirable beachfront properties’, which may soon require scuba gear for inspection.
Tim’s book envisages the further changes that we may see (alongside those that we are already seeing) due to the global experiment that humanity is performing, without a control world to see if it’s a good idea. The effects on the environment and people, both in his own country of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and worldwide, are the subjects of the book. The changes are envisaged in the very title of the book, with the shift from the words New Zealand to something recognisable, but quite different.
If the book’s topic sounds a little overwhelming, the poems themselves are witty, controlled and moving. As someone who is trying to write on the same issues, without breaking into long and unseemly rants, I recommend this timely book to anyone who is concerned with climate change. (Which is a bit like saying anyone who thinks, really.) Personal history is a concern in New Sea Land as well, notably in poems such as ‘The map’, but this is inextricably linked with questions of the treatment, control and ownership of land.
I have had the pleasure of editing a book with Tim, and is intriguing to see how he has moved his political concerns to the centre of his creative practice with New Sea Land. And what a cover by Claire Beynon, showing a person teetering on a thin rope. Tim’s poems are also attempts to find a way of walking the new landscapes we are creating, where loss and uncertainty surround us all.
New Sea Land is available from the publisher, Mākaro Press, who are producing great books. Here are the details:
Title: New Sea Land
Author: Tim Jones
Publisher: Mākaro Press
ISBN: 978-0-9941299-6-3
$25 (NZ).
PS Cottier 