Natural Waves

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Nature/ The Sea. This, to my mind, is a perfect progression from Joy (although I don’t get out in nature anything like as much as I used to – or should – these days and, while this isn’t the furthest I’ve ever lived from the sea, it’s still a lot further than I was for most of the first three decades of my life. Very few sounds strike right into my chest on a curl of homesickness and I’m-in-my-right-place-ness as the sound of gulls, let alone the crash of surf. Nature poetry isn’t something that I thought I did, right up until I started compiling this and realising that there was a lot less sea and a lot more nature in my back catalogue than I’d assumed. I blame my Fenland poetry pals for this...! There is a fine and long tradition of poets writing about both – as lovely, terrifying, wonderful, immense, tiny, untouchable, intimate things of themselves and also, of course, as allegory.

As if I’d do something like that...!

As with Joy, these poems are generally quite short, so you get more of them in this section, I think, than any other except the last. You think I’d know by now! As with the previous sections, the poems run through a range of vibes, in order to transport you from the previous to the next theme. How well this works for every reader is yet to be seen, obviously!

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Unlike the others, I had a fair idea of what I wanted to depict here. Although it, too, has shifted away from the hands holding a verdant island in the sea to the above – less fanciful, but still quite fantastical. This image also marks the first where I was drawing things I could not see to copy, which made for an interesting initial panic, slowly overcome when I realised how much fun I was having. Is the image perfect? By no means. Does it convey what I want it to? Well enough. Did I learn anything making it? Loads, my friend. Loads. Including some fascinating facts about the mechanics of climbing plants…

Joyful Flails

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Joy. This might seem an odd segue from Anger, but I promise it makes sense. For a start, many of the same neurochemicals are released in a burst of happiness as from rage, which may account for the sense of intoxication that either bring. But to choose to experience joy is a powerful statement about your ownership of your life, and can take some practice, especially in Interesting Times like these.

You’ll doubtless be entirely unshocked to hear that the joys depicted in the book are rarely simple, and they’re often mixed in with something a little bitter, to leaven the potentially cloying nature of the section. Appropriately enough (though rather to my own surprise when compiling this), a fair number of the pieces are centred around food, and how that facilitates connections between people, demonstrates our common humanity. Many of them are quite short, but that means more happy poems in order to fill roughly the same number of pages.

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Except that, at the time of writing this, we were still debating about the one above and the one below:

I knew from quite early on that I wanted to show the “flapping” stim that people use when the happy feelings breach all containment and you just have to jiggle. By the time the book has gone to press, we’ll have decided which one brings a more apt sensation of movement on the printed page…

Angry Signs

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Anger. A particularly potent distillation of – or diversion from – passion. Here you’ll find poems which talk about the importance of letting rage out to earth itself harmlessly, and the sensations of being helpless within your own fury when pushed beyond endurance, taking in, along the ways, some focuses for (or causes of) righteous wrath. The world is a difficult place, and sometimes anger is the only sensible response unless you want to risk giving up altogether.

This section will have the fewest poems, because most of them are hefty rants and I’m aiming for an equal page length between the sections. (At the time of writing this, it’s difficult to know if that ambition has worked… exciting…!)

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Finding poses that summed up my complex relationship with rage was… tricky. There are a fair number of other options tucked into the archive, but this won out for all sorts of reasons.

Passionate Gestures

Spectral (a forthcoming poetry collection from Burning Eye you might have witnessed me talking about before now… just a touch…) is divided into seven sections, each representing a broad vibe or emotional state/ expression. Each section is represented by a colour, and, within each section, the pieces form their own graduation through the topic. At least, that’s the theory! I must admit that I’m intrigued to find out whether this works for everyone who reads it (especially the guerilla readers like me who like to pounce at will and at random into collections).

However this pans out, I wanted to represent each section with its own simple illustration that wouldn’t rely on the colour coding. For ages I couldn’t think how to find symbols that were both universally evocative and adaptable to each vibe. (I was also racking my brains over what could be drawn by me with relative ease and without having to incur licensing fees, etc.)

In the end, I’ve gone with hands, partly for the reason that hands are used in communication a great deal – whether consciously or not – and partly because I, personally, talk with my hands a lot. And, while I suspect the gestures I’ve picked won’t turn out to be quite universally evocative (even looking back at my original notes I’ve clearly strayed quite far, in some instances, from my original intentions!), they’re proving an interesting study, not least because I’m, well, still learning how to draw, and hands are often cited as one of the most difficult things to depict.

Luckily, I’m still at the copying stage of skill acquisition…! (And you can see the specific illustrations I'm making for some of the individual poems here.)

So here’s the first one – Passion, as represented by these hands:

Basically – I look like this a lot when I’m talking about something I’m really into, and likewise when I’m performing, so these were the gestures I chose. I particularly like that they could be playing musical instruments as well as expounding on something I’m infodumping about…

It makes sense to start with Passion, really – a stirring of the blood, a determination, something to get us out of bed in the morning (or to keep us in it…). The poems here range from an awe-struck summoning through the shifting complications of long-term relationships, the sundering nature of lust and desire, and the resolution to own your own identity.