With others in your absence

With others in your absence tells the story of a return to the living, travelling out of the acuteness of grief into new ways of being towards others. Moving forwards and occasionally backwards in time, it celebrates the platonic relationships through which the speaker learns to readjust to a world made strange following the loss of a parent. Many of the poems are very loosely based on seasons 1114 of the classic series of Doctor Who, each drawing its title and imagery from a different serial. Excerpt from '2017' Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. Its been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him father, and anyway, dad sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead cant be addressed as lyric people. Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when youve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple thats fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.