Some readings form my poetry book, Songs of a Sad Summer
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Some of my novels and poetry you may enjoy:
I peered around in the darkness. Neither the light of the stars, nor a streetlight, filled the blank void. I actually hadn’t rolled into the wall; I wasn’t even in bed. I’d hit the back of the couch — the short one.
As Caitlyn''s week of working nights draws to a close, she comes to question her belief that her past decisions have brought her to where she is; is she now too far along the her chosen road to have a choice? Or is it time itself which holds her prisoner in a place she no longer wishes to be.
The lift doors opened onto the tunnel. Like any entrance to hell, it smelt stale. Stale vomit, stale urine. Stale bodies, everywhere. A winter of rain couldn’t cleanse it. Tattered posters clung at odd places to the walls, reminding everyone to be alert, not alarmed. Despite two security guards sharing a smoke, the tunnel remained a perfect place for a murder.
Over the course of just one work shift, Caitlyn discovers it takes but a packet of Twisties, a ghost, and thoughts of a minotaur for her to break free.
Also available on Amazon (kindle or paperback)
A book of poetry by Anne Harrison
I’ve spent too long not seeing.
Shadows are for remembering;
They hold no secret depths, only echoes.
Also available on Amazon (kindle / paperback)
The novella In A Dark Wood Wandering weaves two storylines through the modern day and early Renaissance Florence.
Leaving behind a depersonalised world, a young woman seeks a retreat in a convent in the hills above Florence. Here, she soon discovers, is an Irish Mother Superior with a Machiavellian agenda against a communist mayor and invading archeologists. She soon has 'la donna bella' helping exhume some old graves at the convent, some of which date back to early Renaissance time.
In one of the graves she unexpectedly finds the remains of a young woman of wealth, buried with her child - and someone else. This is the woman from the other storyline. A daughter of a newly-rich merchant and a greedy mother, she is unusual for her time in that her father has taught her to read. The day before her father finalises her arranged marriage, he takes to the Badia, to hear Boccaccio reading from the works of Dante. Whilst there, her life is irrevocably changed.
Through the interweaving of these worlds, both young women – unnamed throughout the novella -–learn not only how to lose loss but also that to be un-noticed is not synonymous with invisibility, or worthlessness. Both learn to see themselves.
Also available on Amazon (kindle / paperback)
An elderly matriarch walks through walks through her kitchen garden in the Tuscan hills, carrying her sketch book. The morning mists swirls around her, but soon they will fade and it will be time for the Spring Offering.
The mist muffled the day. It lay over the light, holding captive the cold air of dawn, until under the warmth of a late morning it would become nothing but a chill memory. Spring was still a few weeks away, and for a while longer winter would hold the hills captive. The valley below her was a world of grey. A tangible, moist grey, which flowed and ebbed with the centuries. It came with its own remembrances, damp with clinging. Of journeys to places where there was no winter, of the magic of coming home. Of lying warm abed with her beloved whilst the bells called. Of being young.
In another time, in a Venetian palazzo, a lord fumes on learning a priceless statuette, of an Etruscan goddess, has been stolen. He knows her worth, but remains ignorant of both her history and the power of her beauty over others.
Waves of cold anger flooded the room, spilling into halls where servants hid in the shadows, pretending not to hear. The wrath spiralled down the marble staircase and into the spacious receiving hall, made a few twirls under the candelabra then past the imposing tapestries hanging from the walls. It pushed through the heavy wooden doors and onto the chaos of the street outside. There it searched for a horse and rider who had fled through the night and continued now by day, splattered by the foam of exhaustion.
As the mists of the morning fade, the two times and places overlap, and the goddess returns to the light of the world.
also available on Amazon