Paul Batchelor

Paul Batchelor’s new collection, The Acts of Oblivion, will be published next month.

Two Poems

Paul Batchelor, 18 November 2021

Last Poem

i.m. Derek Mahon

We value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof – no, not astral planeswhere the dream-soul wanders,but airport corridors,bus stations, the Gare du Nord,a beach house in Goa,testing posteritywith promises to break.

Who wouldn’t picture...

Poem: ‘A Form of Words’

Paul Batchelor, 18 April 2019

Just as, after the affair, when I knew I was in the clear but came down with trismus of all things and had, needs must, to post the ‘finest sashimi in Brooklyn’ through the half-inch letterbox between my upper & my lower incisors    poking it in there with the chopsticks yearning to contribute in a non-confrontational way to Miss X & her sister & her...

Poem: ‘The Curlew’

Paul Batchelor, 20 April 2017

Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress.

Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue.

The vulnerable economies of owl & fox. Fields brushed, as by a comet’s tail, with winter.

No announcement. No sign of the guard. We have reached the threshold, it is everywhere at once

in depthless white drifts unbroken...

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