Ravenser Odd
Michael Daniels
In between bringing up children and working as a psychotherapist in the NHS, Michael Daniels has been steadily writing poetry and prose
for the past thirty years. In 2015 he graduated from the Oxford University MSt. Creative Writing programme, where the poem cycle Ravenser Odd was conceived. This is his first pamphlet of poems.
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'A richly detailed page-turner and wonderfully compelling, Ravenser Odd is a vivid, haunting meditation on the power of the elements and powerlessness, and on the active endurance of the historical afterlife ‘where absence crowds the empty air’. Inventive and lyrical, the music of Daniels’ terza rima narration dramatises the story of this drowned town with a marvellous propulsion, not unlike that of the imagined sea, which ‘would not be spoken through, // or paraphrased, or watered down.' Jane Draycott
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‘Michael Daniels’ Ravenser Odd is a bold, imaginative recreation of a place lost to the sea, powerfully evoking flood, tempest and the passage of time. The poem takes on a formal challenge worthy of its subject.’
Sean O’Brien.
Lost Stories
How can their stories be shored up?
They crumble weak as glacial till.
Biographies discarded, rup-
tured, half remembered detail,
still embodied with a trace of those
who by some form of ghostly will,
persist, denying how we choose
to represent their mortal acts.
So they return to re-impose
their agency upon the facts,
to squat in bodies, spirit-kind,
put flesh on bone and re-enact
their fatal lives. In this, they find,
they haunt themselves, and learn to strive
by proxy in our sleepless minds,
as we turn over weightless lives…
Prologue_Living ghosts
The land fortells its future
