Publications

Dogma
D. S. Marriott
The poems relate to this African history -- scarcely over our horizon, however broad its dimensions -- as a hymn might relate to a body of sacred history: an intensely emotional outcry alluding to shared knowledge. They are inexplicit, free in handling, traumatic, frightening tales of seizure and becoming.' --Andrew Duncan, Jacket 20
£3.00, 22pp, ISBN 978-1-903488-24-9, 2001
Author Biography
D. S. Marriott is the author of: Hours into Seasons (1987); Schadenfreude(1988); Floodtide (1989); Clouds & Forges (1991); Airs & Ligatures(1991); Lative (1992)
More about D. S. Marriott»Excerpt
I talk only of the sea coiled on the rim of the ear: a landscape of birds, gathered at low tide, the many corpses beneath the currents undersea; which is a proof in itself of life in the midst of reverses. The loss of those years, the vines the amphora the phantasmal light fleeing into evening,--- ghosts, proof of my mind's obsolescence lost between fury and solitude, nemesis and fate. Beneath the bowsprit and the tide a rekindled light starts up in us, it is Ethiopia rising and stretching forth, it is an old man raging to make an end outlive its use, a last illimitable voyage beyond the endlessness of birth. Rising, there in darkness; the region of the dead on a calm desolate sea, land where nations rise near and far, strong and triumphant. Myself now, a part of all that I met: the light that defined me when the stars fell black against a black daytime black again... almost the opposite of madness. For years we endured isolation nakedness---driven over the grief-blackened earth--- reaching for a star to take us home: so why this monumental impossible light, black again? And why venture into the abyss of the world? We mirrored the gods' phantasms as well as rages...like them wanderers and victims.