Author Archives: colinhopkirk

At last! Our new book of poetry has just been published. Thanks to all concerned, especially Vernon and Phil Dunn at Leveret Press. Available now at £7.99 plus p&p. More poetry on these pages soon.

It takes iron dismantling leviathans brute strength and blades axe saw flensing spade bible knife reducing until  what remains  looks more like leaves and nothing like it was. We could not bear it if it did.

Whale lamps   When the lamps go on in Whitby the light comes from whales. There’s an echo of the tide in the lamps hiss and the faintest scent      so faint  that you could almost miss the trace of blown-breath iron and salt Whale Bones Women walk like wading birds their stiffened bodies  narrowed atContinue reading “Whales”

I know it backwards the version with ‘trespasses’ which isn’t heard so much these days. Most of us know how it goes it’s more or less cemented in. You might not like it but you can’t deny it’s got something a shared point of reference a talisman    a certainty  a portable amount of hope withContinue reading “I know it backwards”

Always a sadness in your songs leavened with humour mostly at your own expense baked in a rackety country store.  In your obit I read you roomed with Malkmus clever left-field gifted for sure but  he seemed frat-boy cruel and glib and you did not.  You shone for years still shine through songs  and poetry. Continue reading “Berman Gone”

How does a man become  a different creature  without warning change his shape in three seconds?  I say three seconds it could have been less. I never counted them. I was too busy thinking about sunlight slanting through trees how rushing water sounds across a pebble bed naming the feathers  in a birds wing.

When we look up from otter sign scattered mussel shells  short cuts to the water holes in the gully bank our eyes catch two cormorants parting a white sky. Here comes nature  in all its particulars. Dancing through long grass ringlets and gatekeepers  roman snails in the verges and a brown hare in the beetContinue reading “In all its particulars”

An Angel you say?  And from a certain angle I see what you see. Bipedal, yes, and  at first glance approximately right. But not an Angel. Don’t be fooled by brightness or prayers  chanted over water by feather and spear. Look again. See the angle of its head the way it moves? It is onlyContinue reading “Not an Angel”

New rain cleans usafter weeks of heatand lockdown irritationsmy daughter’s new anxietiesgoogled from god knows where.It is good to cool down.It is good to just walkone foot in front of anotherfor a few miles by the Witham, spot where otters wereclusters of mussel shellsneat pathways to the watersix deer in the field andrafted down the sideContinue reading “Riverwalk”

The day before yesterday  my daughter showed me where  a dozen bumblebees or more were  dancing in the eaves outside her window taking turns to slip into the roof,  emerging later worse for wear. Checking online, where almost everything’s  explained to some degree, and may be partly true, we learned that these were tree-bumblebees, thatContinue reading “Disco Bees”