Fossil Sunshine and Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding by Michael McKimm

https://www.worplepress.com/fossil-sunshine/

https://www.worplepress.com/because-we-could-not-dance-at-the-wedding/

Fossil Sunshine was published in 2013 and Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding this year, so it is interesting to encounter these two words a decade a part.

Fossil Sunshine, perhaps surprisingly for some, makes a rich poetry from geology. These are nature poems I guess, a deep rootedness in the landscapes they describe, moments in time and yet also speaking of geological time.

An example from it:

The Bindon Landslide

When the earth began to move, cracks daggering

the chalk cliff path, they thought nothing of it,

went home to their beds, the landlord’s Christmas

whisky still hot on their breath, bellies happy

with sweetmeats and pickle. They slept with deep,

dark dreams of the day, of the horse buckling

in the limestone quarry and heavy hods cutting

their shoulders, then darker dreams of sulphur

and sinkholes, dank pools of bitumen, rivers

of leachate, pipelines, convoys, midnight tankers,

and the sea roaring, agitated, an intolerable

stench that woke them, their tenements rending

and sinking, the moon in the window entirely ajar,

fissures gaping, they’d say, like the mouth of hell.

Because We Could Not Dance At The Wedding is a collection of love poems, poems written in the context of love and relationship within their, now, husband. So many love poems are written either for a lover we desire but don’t yet have or a lover we have lost but to write the love poems that capture the love of an ongoing relationship is a deeper skill.

Aubade also features in Issue 10 of Fourteen poems, and Michael read that and Daffodils in the IG Live for that.

Conversion recounts their conversion of their civil partnership into marriage – an administrative task at the registry office which takes them a little by surprise with its power:

“…

I don’t think I fully knew before

what language can do:

that the weight of our vows

is somehow writ larger now

is not something I thought I would admit.

...”

And the longest poem, Tattoo, explores the experience of giving blood for the first time after the NHS removed the ban on Gay men in 2021…

“…

I wish that anger wasn’t

needled deep

I wish our friends knew more about our anger

that we did not hold it from them

in the shrug and sleepy smile

of relative peace.

...”