‘You say drone’ featured at Lifesaving Poems

Anthony Wilson has written about my poem ‘You say drone’ from my pamphlet The Misplaced House in his Lifesaving Poems feature.

I first read You say “drone” on the Poems in Which website, Issue 4 (2013). What struck me then, and still amazes me now, is its controlled fury while retaining its central identity as a made artefact, with layers, subtleties, and allusions, all of the things which separate art from propaganda. How appropriate, for a poem that skewers the ‘drone’ of 24/7 ‘news left on’ to which ‘nobody’ listens, to draw our attention to the way in which words are used, in plain sight as it were (‘pass away, drag out‘), to obfuscate and deflect from horrors we would rather not look at. I have wanted to write about it for at least a year. Each time I readied myself to confront its truth (about the world, our media, about me, about how I use language) it seemed another atrocity occurred: Gaza, Paris, Paris again, Brussels, Lahore, Orlando, Istanbul. I’m tempted to call it prophetic.

You can read the poem and Anthony’s full post here.

Huge thanks to Anthony for taking the time to do this.