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New collections in May, June & July 2022
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17 Paper Resurrections, by John Gallas, the winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize.

Recent VOLE  COLLECTIONS
​and D&W PAMPHLETS

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Two poems from this month's featured book: 
POEMS FROM THE MIND SHOP by David Ashbee

"‘Poems from the Mind Shop’ is a gloriously rich book from a poet with a real love of language and the ability to evoke the extraordinary from the everyday. A close observer of people and places, David Ashbee creates finely-drawn characters whose idiosyncrasies we recognise and enjoy ... while  poems about art or nature conjure new perspectives and reveal how the world, not just his old schoolteachers, leave ‘handprints’ on his soul."
               Alicia Stubbersfield, Senior Lecturer in poetry and Arvon tutor

Fairground Girls
 
Screams fly over the rooftops
as their tresses stream behind them,
girls with candyfloss faces
and shining humbug eyes.
 
They ride the bright machine,
gripping the bar in a seizure
of togetherness,
long past the cautious age
when this was a rite of passage
they trembled to endure.
 
Adventure swells them now,
pumps them with its vertigo urges,
twirls them to narcotic heights
tight in the clutch of a lover without shame.
 
Two pound. It only costs
two pound.
They pluck them from small purses.
Their screams can be heard in the forest
on the far slopes of the hill.
​
© David Ashbee
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The Sighting 
 
A dodo came to Genevieve’s allotment.
She was picking runner-beans at the time,
feasting her eyes on a steaming red sun
as it broke through the mist above Toadsmere Wood
so she didn’t see the dodo.
That night it was on the local news,
though the sunrise didn’t feature.
 
Witnesses worked out that this rarely-seen creature
must have somehow made its way from the clock-tower
where it was first spotted by a short-sighted old lady
who mistook it for her grandson,
to the disused cemetery where it was captured
on Tom Critchley's mobile phone.
He saw it lumber clumsily--
'I felt kinda sorry for it then,'
he told the lass with the microphone--
down the lane to the Applegarth Allotments
which is precisely where Gen never saw it.
 
Everybody pestered her at skittles
at The Shearman's Arms that night
but she shrugged it off.
suspected it had something to do with
it being the start of April.

​© David Ashbee
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