Other Lives

I am delighted to be able to post two poems from Alan Morrison's latest book, Captive Dragons/ The Shadow Thorns - Poems from the Mill View Residency 2008-11 by Alan Morrison. This book incorporates an epic poem on the subject of mental illness and its perception throughout the ages, tackling thorny issues such as psychosis and suicide through a series of 35 Cantos exploring different periods, persons and approaches to the psychiatric and social treatment of mental illness. A Laingian sensibility drives towards some uncomfortable speculations as to 'mental illness' as, in part, a socio-political construct. The Shadow Thorns ( from which these poems are taken) is a sequence of smaller poems, each a study of composites of various inpatients encountered by the author during his three year voluntary poetry workshop residency at Mill View psychiatric hospital in Hove. Flo of the solitudes Flo’s patron of the moment’s immersion, Timelessly lit in a pool of her own Out-pouring, h...

Here is a link to a Guardian article about an e-anthology, 'Emergency Verse' , that was released recently and which I contributed a short poem to. The anthology was edited by Alan Morrison and includes work by, among others, Debjani Chatterjee, Michael Horovitz, Simon Jenner, Judith Kazantzis, John O' Donoghue, Mario Petrucci, Naomi Foyle, and Michael Rosen.