148 x 210mm, 32 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitch, soft cover, 2023

Gavin grabs little Tom’s throat, a violent hold like love, brutality and tenderness disregarding each other’s borders. Dog Shades is acoustic ecology – poems of walking and noticing and curiosity. Dog roses sniff out grief, suck it up, return ‘particulate scents’ as ‘basic air’. Plants purify and putrefy. We’ll listen to ‘it’, the ‘it’ that’s everywhere cleft. These poems are pared and barking. It’s not easy to breathe in here, outdoors, or to speak; speech is a mouth gaping wide to listen. Microphones aren’t always a bursting sac protected from spit by a pop filter. Scent, residue and memory are material. Waft sentiment. Tom trudges through impasto layers of experience and memory. Linebreak marks are subtle shifts in gear-grinding grammar and stutter. Sometimes I’ll feel like connective tissue has been removed from this verse, arthritic word-nerves don’t fire but scrape against each other. But we’re not sure that’s really the case, the cartilage isn’t gone, it’s everywhere too, barks interweaving between gardens, the caw always a “caw back” in reply. Hear where the poems’ memories multiply, split and wildflower. We’re already part of the chorus in part. Then the split-ends sing, the ‘shard wash’ of ‘stress forms’ arranged with such care that music plays, Tom’s arrangement of broken sounds becomes a record with which we can build life. We’re deep listening in the syncretic mess, where the ‘fecal sludge’ is ‘not yet separated’ and that’s key – shit isn’t separated from life, from play, from burial. Unconditional love under these conditions is everywhere and it’s impossible. ‘It’s a common stinkhorn egg sliced in two.’ – Nisha Ramayya & Rob Kiely

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