The 39 poems, a selection from the work of several years, range widely, from the precisely-observed descriptive to the philosophical, from the lyrical to the (subtly) polemical, from moments captured to stories told. They share precision of language, clarity of expression, and a revealing of the deeply felt.

Appreciations:

“One poem stopped me dead with its haunting music … Thank you, thank you for The Traveller, which rescued me for a moment from my bleak New York life. It has the glimmer of the mysteries I sensed in your landscape.” Edward Field, American poet and author.

“Sunrise from Likavittos … a tale told with elegance and precision.” Ron Woollard New Hope International Review.

“This is a collection full of hidden treasures. Behind the deceptively simple exteriors of Walton’s poems there are complex interweavings of love and pain, and sudden shifts into the unconscious.” Jeremy Hilton Fire.

54 pages                  £3                  Available from brimstone-press.com.

Sample pages:

Sunrise from Likabettos

Stamped steel, flexing like razor blades,
sickle clean, with hooligan whistles the swifts swarm in,
snap past, circling with consuming intent the moths
quivering at the light.

Too many moths: shaking in ecstasies, yearning,
ardent as acolytes, needy as fans. And sinister:
fat fur bodies, unearthly susurrus
of myriad soft wings fluttering …;
rebellious stained angels halting in their nine-day fall
for just one night, one last grasp at light …;
critical massing to a group mind,
a protean malign shape …

Wall dark dissolves to cloud dark.
Waves of not-dark wash dark from the air successively,
reveal transparency; and black marks in the distance.
The moths loosen their grip,
uncertain in their love of light between two lights,
some float a way. Most cling on –
faith superseding send? Or simply waiting sense’s
switch from light to light …
The swifts arrive. The light goes out.

Magnet of light switched off, the moths drift,
stretching in ambient light, floating,
vigil completed, night’s ecstasy over.
The swifts’ steel-sprung precision picks them off,
this mazy flight no match for arrowed certainty;
soft ‘top’, moustache mouth, swerve away;
from every angle they stab the air clean; and disappear.
the air is empty. There is silence.
A bloody eyeball heaves into view.

The traveller

A field of wheat as wide as the sky
that stretches behind it like a banner of silk.
And in that vastness, almost lost, a figure
walking slowly, leaving no tracks,
and yet, engoldened by the wheat,
emboldened by the sky, travelling
with the certainty of a slow arrow toward
the target’s gold of her chosen destiny.

She starts as a lark bursts up from the stalks,
then spirals up with it
until it is lost to sight
and only the song remains.
She stoops to a poppy’s redness
and sinks into its stigma’d heart.

Dusk, a wood, a lighted place
a companion there, welcoming,
for a day, a year,
maybe most of a lifetime;
but still sometime, she will walk on.

Camargue flamingos

Their heads are magnolia buds about to bloom
this swaying bunch of strange flowers.

All curves, two, face to face, touch, make suddenly a heart –
but bodily clash beaks and shriek outlandishly.

On knitting needle legs they step, carefully,
as if between their own eggs.

They plunge pink heads into the mud,
pull up stained brown, fierce-eyed, fed, and plunge again.

One, a broken parasol opening, flaming paper rising, lifts
resolves into a flying machine with wings too-short
that whirr too fast, neck stretched, legs trailing, makes
a circuit of the lake, as if to test in air the separateness of itself,
spreads like a parachute descending, reaches through water, mud,
settles back, folding, into the place it’s just left.