Tag: poetry

Introducing- The House on Devil’s Lane!

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At LAST I have some exciting book news!

My fifth psychological thriller The House on Devil’s Lane (S. L. Ireland) will be released on September 24th as a Kindle ebook and as a paperback. I do believe the ebook is now available to preorder on Amazon and will appear silently and mysteriously on your kindle on publication day if you buy HERE.

Okay, that’s the hard sell out of the way! I just wanted to write a little bit about the process and ideas behind the book. It has been said (and not by me, it was The Sunday Post, actually!) that I write about difficult things with sensitivity and realism, and while novels are essentially a means of entertainment, and an enjoyable diversion, I do like to include some timely and troubling topics. With The Unmaking of Ellie Rook, for example (novel no.3) the underlying theme was one of coercive control and the emotional damage it does.

So, true to form, The House on Devil’s Lane has some very compelling characters with pressing problems and harrowing secrets. How they act when the chips are down…well, that’s where the fiction comes in! Hopefully, you will be with main character Kat every step of the way as she negotiates her new life in a new home while juggling the demands of new motherhood. It’s hard feeling alone and isolated in a new place, but is Kat ever really alone? I’ll let you decide, dear Reader…

Where did the idea come from? I will tell all in a series of blog posts, but first, the setting. As much as a love Scotland, I wanted to step over the border for a wee change, and the idea for this book came to me while I was visiting my brother in County Durham. He lives in a village which consists essentially of a single road with, as fate would have it, an empty house at the end, and behind it, the most amazingly eerie wood….

More next week!

A New Year Poem

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The Ghost of the Year Past

    In a dark wood, she stood

    in a circle of yews,

    The Ghost of the Year Past

    each one knotted with red thread,

    lest we forget.

    On each tree, a rune, a foreboding.

    We’d passed this way before.

    To me, she looked like a corpse bride,

    her face masked with her own hand,

    unable to tell the story of

    2020.

    In her other hand she held a bouquet

    of white Christmas roses.

    As I watched, she grew blue with cold.

    The sky opened, until she was veiled in snowflakes,

    each crystal, each cross-stich and half-stich as fine as lace.

    Every snowflake unique, over 70,000 now.

    The look she gave me chilled me to the bone.

    She tossed her bouquet into the New Year

    and I caught it, its thorns needles of ice,

    drawing blood.

    I couldn’t follow her. When she left

    her tracks were lost to the blizzard.

    I sniffed the roses and they were still as sweet.

    Turning away, I found a new path.

    Sandra Ireland, 2021

    National Poetry Day

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    ‘I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.’

    – Pablo Neruda

    I love these lines. They describe perfectly the creative connection between the landscape and us. Recently, I have been devoting my energy almost exclusively to novel-writing,

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    and I must admit I miss the process of creating a poem, the makings of which swirl around the brain in a totally different way to the plot of a novel; the words are liberated somehow. There are no rules, no expectations.

    On National Poetry Day, perhaps we should all be taking a moment to write a few lines, as a way of connecting with what’s important to us, or simply to recapture the joy of writing for the sheer pleasure of it. I was delighted to find myself in the Angus edition of The Courier today alongside some proper poets! Feeling rather rusty, I decided to look out some of my poems inspired by the landscape. The first was written at Barry Mill, and the second is rather seasonal. Happy National Poetry Day! 

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    Ghost Mill

    The wheel turns.

    Dust falls from every wormhole;

    every sandstone pore. Spores slacken

    with the thump and thrum;

    the din of timber.

    The mill exhales, expands,

    loosening old lives

    like buttons on a waistcoat.Moonlight B&W Barry Mill

     

    The wheel turns.

     

    Shapes shift in the dark;

    sparks blue as eyes;

    the scent of old smoke.

    The re-formed flour ghosts

    of old men settle

    beneath the faint silver of

    their names.

    grim mill

    The wheel turns.

     

    The damsel in the machinery,

    skirt dappled with

    paw-prints, slack-jaws gossip

    down through generations;

    until the past

    meshes with the present.

     

    On and on.

    And still…

    the wheel turns.                                                  Sandra Ireland

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         Signed by the artist

    With gloomy brushstrokes

    Guardi paints Venice. All

    pale piazzas and falling skies;

    lagoons breathing gunsmoke.

    Adds a signature fleck of red.

    All winter I wait, colourless,

    under snow-bruised clouds;

    breathing ice cobwebs on glass.

    Until, at last, Nature adds

    a bright splash

    of robin.

     

    Sandra Ireland

    animal avian beak bird

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com