Below are two poems from William Wootten’s new collection, Landline, forthcoming from Worple Press this October. Landline is Wootten’s first full-length collection in almost a decade, since You Have a Visitor (Worple) in 2016.

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This Summer

I want something as wonderful as living in this summer
With cat’s ear and hawkbit both out-yellowing a grass,
Which is not brown yet, though it soon will pass
From one state to another without clamour,

That passing felt as is a recent tremor
Continuing through lovers whose drowsiness deepens to amass
A deeper drowsiness. It is a windlass
Clanking the anchor up through shade and shimmer

Of a coolness resting underneath a boat.
It is a whiteness in a goldfinch throat
And a belly of a swallow flying low now,

As its world reveals a world whose sigils tell
Unocculted revelation in a great spell
That tells itself — there’s nothing more to know now.

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The Wheatsheaf

The summer that I married
I wore a fine straw hat.
I stood in the pub carpark
And the beer was golden,

As all the kind young women
I knew when I was single
Stood and raised their glasses
And told me I was handsome,

Though I was ancient as the bones
Crouched down inside the barrow,
As patient as the earthworks
Stretched out along the hill

Before my bride to be
Came by in her light dress,
Arms in copper bangles,
Hair plaited like the corn.