We asked for feedback on issue 6, and were pleased to find that many of the poems found admirers. Just out in front, though, was Seth Crook with his poem Lighthouse, 1904. We're very pleased to feature two more of Seth's poems.

R is for Regress

R is for Regress.
Infinite regress.
An endless ancestry.
A stuck keyboard letter
whizzing along the screen. Whee...
Can’t stop it.
Preconditions to excess,
unless Ockam’s razor’s bluntness
is some subtle abstract blessing.
All of us rhyming so frantically,
over and over...
...bit, nit, wit. All looking for
the first internal rhyme,
back on the unfound line 1.
All so fond of stairs,
always next-stepping;
all so keen on theoretical
and abstract progressing
in our long study of ingress
without egress.
Our big trip backwards, zoom,
hunting for the first, the less
or even more complex,
the bit before, the done before,
the wheel within the wheel,
the wheels within mini-wheels.
All so much better than
the little vicious circles – bless.
They are mere robins.
Regresses are the owls of reason
beyond all intelligibility.
Hidden in the recesses of our barns,
blank-eyed, beyond inquiry
to the point of rude.
With littler owls inside their barns,
homunculi, homunculus,
homunculess.


(Published in The Centrifugal Eye, Autumn 2012)

Owl Minds

Their thoughts so different
that we must wonder
whether they are thoughts at all

or only a kind of inward shadow
that marks lit edges
and is otherwise dark and blank,

gistless as the dead shrew,
meaningless as the circling "O"
from which mouths swoop to eat.

Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before deciding to move to the Hebrides. He does not like cod philosophy in poetry, but likes cod, philosophy and poetry. His poems have recently appeared both in print and on-line, in Other Poetry, Snakeskin, Gutter, Poetry Scotland (Open Mouse), Ink, Sweat and Tears, Message in a Bottle, The Journal, Northwords Now, The Interpreter's House, The Centrifugal Eye, Streetcake, The London Grip, The Passionate Transitory, The Delinquent, the Poet's Graves anthology "Making Contact", and the excellent Antiphon!

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