Digitally Organic

Digitally Organic - Front Cover

In this collection, ideas about how we relate to animals, to landscape and to each other, and some wonderfully observed portaits of the natural world, are set against the sometimes extraordinary efforts of human beings to live within the complex, technological world we have made for ourselves.

The writers are the winners of the 2006 WordArt Poetry Competition, the second Earlyworks Press Open Poetry Competition, and a selection from the Earlyworks Press Writers and Reviewers Club workshop.

Extracts

Mountain a La Mode

“A $1 billion Chinese clothing mountain is

held at European borders”, August, 2005

At daybreak

the shoulder-padded silhouette

frays into fringed outcrops

denim slopes

printed flowers

between seams of smart black

patchwork stitched into stillness

waiting mode.

Under the cover of shot-silk dusk

a sudden rustle of crisp shirts

half-buttoned

collars up

flutters towards a small boat.

A shimmy of brocade tunics

with side slits

strides sexily to a lorry

beckoning to some jeans.

All slip into the dark

of a cold container.

Several pairs of kids’ dungarees

totter into trees lining a road

where casual suits gather them

into backpacks.

Squads of padded jackets march forward

hem in the guard-post

crack of bullets

cotton-wool bleeds through vents.

Silence among the remnants.

Then a mixed weave of bright tops

linen shorts, soft shawls

rushes the Eurostar

slides over startled legs

slithers up goose-fleshed arms

snakes round resistant necks

eager to be bought

at almost any price.

Margaret Eddershaw

Adder

The graffito

scrawled on the track

curves inked in indigo

leaching into violet,

goes unnoticed

until

I sense a sudden

tension, a winding-in

of energy;

Celtic S

becomes

heraldic river.

He keeps my distance

then erases himself

drains into scrub

sloughs

his rubbed-out scribble

in the dust.

Sylvia Oldroyd

Computer_Minded

Unplug, undo, unscrew to find
a forbidden city inside walls
broken down only by confidence
in your knowledge of its streets,
of what that city is and how
it works, humming with light
passed fast through sand, and how
it sleeps, pregnant with dreams
that make it what it is. Chances
and connections following networks,
where holding hands with others
makes a building in your mind
and we define another city
in the space between our collective ears.
Inside, here it is in miniature –
the city of ones and zeroes, there
and not there, true and false,
making sense out of ticks and crosses,
turning ping and whir into language,
the snap of synapses allowing the other city
to evolve, emerge within the matrix,
created in our minds by a machine,
subtle but real.

Grace Garner

56 poems by 31 poets

Published by Earlyworks Press ISBN 9780955342967

£6.50 + £1 towards p&p to UK addresses

Digitally Organic - Cover Art Detail

Cover Art by Catherine Edmunds

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