Isserley (2021), is a poem based on the titular character from Michel Faber's novel Under The Skin and Jonathan Glazer's resulting film of the same name. The poem, taken from my recent collection of poems, Blood dimension & other poems, explores the complexity of the character, her search and ultimately her fate.
Blood dimension & other poems is an ongoing collections of poems exploring the meeting point of science-fiction, abstraction and cosmic misanthropy. Building upon the approach of previous collection, Rats (2018), in sourcing inspiration from literature, cinema, music, dreams and the imagination, Blood dimension & other poems delves deeper into the darker side of the universe and its resulting life, creating planes in which malevolent entities scour in their hunting, where vast vibrant worlds end as quickly as they are birthed, where unimaginable beings contemplate the weight of consciousnesses and where dimensions weave and fold within one another, on the brink of the most absurd and surreal dreams.
(Images courtesy of Film 4 & Studio Canal).
Isserley.
Eyes upon a ghastly moor,
beside a bleak mere, a human form
nowhere, amongst mist, wet earth
and alien silences—
words learned, transcribed, merged,
dissapitate, spent breath in depths,
messages, from new thoughts;
heavy bone, weighted lung and heart;
perverse biology, as carrion—
she starts a car, carries on, drives
without knowing—
night cradles her, so familiar,
deserted in a wandering, a learning;
locus, solus, one and the same.