As the evenings become darker and thoughts turn to the ending of the year, it feels an appropriate timing for the publication of my new pamphlet, Failing Light. It’s published by the recently established The Damson Press, a small press here in the North West of England under the editorship of Rebecca Bilkau.
Failing Light explores the changes that occur over time in a long-term relationship; from the exhilaration of falling in love, through the addition of children, to long term and unresolved frictions and perhaps ultimately to the final decision of whether to leave or whether to stay. Failing Light explores what it is that cements two people together, what there is to gain and what there is to lose. It is about the complex entanglement of two lives and how cracks can appear and how easily they can spread.
Some days are not for making decisions
mountains sweep down to black eyes
of tarns boulders rest in the helter-skelter
of gulleys stream-side wooded clothed
slowly in a green baize of moss
my gaze burns
on granite quartz and feldspar
tune my ears to displaced wind keening
test my boots on the certainty of millennia
and find myself wanting
edge of silver-plattered water against moor
edge of tawny bracken against rising roar of rock
edge of scribbled ridge against floor of cloud
edge of volcanic spire sheer against sky
what I thought about today –
a jumper becoming threadbare at the elbows
how patches are really only that
how exchanging one set of circumstances
for another is tiring
my boys
I think that the poems are a reminder of why a couple stays together, the resilience there can be in a relationship and why it’s OK sometimes to walk separate ways. The poems are not about a specific relationship particularly but rather drawn from a lifetime of experience.
I am also deeply indebted to the amazing poet and painter Jan Dean for allowing me to use her painting One Small Boat as a cover image.
The pamphlets cost £7 and if you’d like a copy, email me at ilsepedler@protonmail.com
Here I am at the launch reading last week at the fantastic Farmer’s Arms
