Arachne Press

Life comes at you in waves, sometimes they carry you to new shores, sometimes you risk drowning in the flood. Life is a pulse, a heart pumping the blood of now and the blood memories of the past and of your ancestors. Life is a beat, a dance, a festival where you watch Portishead in a field as the sun sets. Life is the rhythm of all three together, it is the beat, the pulse, the wave that brings you to this moment. Jeremy Dixon pauses to consider and celebrate that which was, that which is and that which could be.

In this our imagined future we watch them sound the trees hoping for deadwood, knowing the living are always harder to cut.– Show Us What it is to Love a Forest with SongA deep-dive into the human relationship with trees and how trees have shaped folklore and literature. Sparked by a campaign to save the ancient forest of Penrhos, an SSSI on Ynys Môn, from being turned into a holiday camp, Ness explores Welsh folklore of trees and her own love for and engagement with the trees and other wild aspects of her home, as well as more common garden flowers, which should be treated with respect (Daffodils are Dangerous). Ness has an ongoing conversation with her native language and some poems are presented bilingually: there is a link to be made between the disregarding of native language and the disregarding of native habitat. Far more than a book of nature poems there is a simmering frustration at the casual way we despoil our environment without any concern for what is destroyed or the ongoing impact of that destruction.