Dorrell Merritt— Selected Poems, Part I (2022).

  • Dorrell Merritt
An edit of poems composed so far this year.


My latest poetry collection, 'Carhartt Blood and other new poems', can be purchased from Slanted and Good Press (Glasgow).

Image: Untitled, 2011, Dorrell Merritt

Dorrell Merritt— Selected Poems, Part I (2022). by Dorrell Merritt
Brent Cross muntjac. hollow, the croaking bark, within night frost, a near echo, across vales; veils of traffic rush, staggered rounds, that sound, abound, sharp— the buck to the doe, and back once again,  taming a-roads, slip-roads and grim flyovers, to a fading wilderness, aside poison, pestillence, spectral with the stillness, the perverse voices, always in high winter (same as the tawnies), beckoning faint, across sleeping rows of homes— ever the marvel, glinting like gold.
Citroën 2CV. A new, proud, tall christmas tree poking out of a broken-down green-striped Citroën 2CV (just like Gail drove in nursery); it’s evening: low tide, the new pair aimlessly a-walking, no talking, in tidal-dredged, dregged mud: maybe I’ll love her, maybe I’ll love, nerves blurred, no words stir— silent pace, clouds laced deep purple, pining for their black sleep; pre-christmas, festive, as babes, shimmering delicate, riverside dusk.
Caput stagnum. Walking rows of sad french catacombs, by a canal so straight; games of cards at a bar, home-born fears afar, in a holiday haze of cold amber— (the riverbed ran dry, by grandiose houses); nights spent, sat by stalls, deep wine, swigged, drunk and spied, chicken fat dripping on country spuds, gone like the lake, most peculiar, as love.
Moriyama at Hamiltons. The selfies, the doggo or Tokyo night shadows— grain thick and heavy as layered lead in mines, as shrines, or a crackling television screen; walls, grey-ultramarine and still, on sheened stone. The man/the child, a world distant monochrome; sharpened from blurred, bland words, backlit as LED’s, strangers’ faces, blank in silver passing: wide eyes, bare flesh and colourless luscious lips— crowds drift on, all just mere ghosts and reflections.
Isle of dogs. Bloodied canines on the canine pack, reared for attack, sacking rabbit cities subterranean and hopeless, uncountable in size and breadth; swarthy by the brindle striped armour, foreign to pull, call or whistle, appeasing death and order by the nip and the lunge. Curved at the tail like a fleshy sickle, crossing swamp, pond or brackish breach, to reach doe, foe and stranger; the colourless land, sallow in winter ice and frost, then gorse and moss, bitches with new plentiful litters, taught by the hunt. Rotting willow, oak, slump by the camp, delicate streams, full of life down to an overgrown embankment, crows on the take, waiting stern; ready the eye, pricked, the ear, in queer thick of fog or grey cascade, a hail of harks, barks, and on.
Parabellum (Steel tears and blood upon the snow).
After the Ukraine invasion. shrunken shapes, in huddled forms, terror-struck, fiendish swarms, emphatic, unimaginable with force, faceless, and wicked— to eradicate, remove, divorce: annihilating, to black, to lamenting dust— wife and child amongst proud crowds and chaos; a skyline lit with vermillion; a terrible glow— ready the arm: cocked, held, aimed, in lane, plain, and rain-soaked street, or in sympathetic snow— whirling whistles, cross gnarled, mourning silver— screams in dread, cracks and crumbling, revenge worn as unslack, black blinkers: blood for blood, in unbiased thuds, faint echoes, slumped steel, felled in a vast, collossal, waning shadow.
Dorrell Merritt
Writer / Visual Artist / Publisher