The handcrafted website of human writer L.A. Hyland
Poems
Poetry, it seems to me, is drawn from a formless miasma of ideas that persists just out of reach. Every notion, concept and thought swirls there, bumping up against each other, waiting for something wild to ignite and escape.
My poetry, once convoluted and adorned with gleaming wreaths of bright flowers, now tends to emerge quite stark. It often barks like a half-hoarse bloodhound that has sat for too long in the sun. It spies nothings in shadows and in-between stars, or lolls in a half-real past where it wrongly believes something vital may be hidden. There are storms and much shrieking. There may be visits from ghosts and spacemen.
Below you can find poems, listed newest to oldest, all written by me. I've included a short insight for each, exploring inspirations and to help clarify intentions. The poems are presented in a raw form in order to preserve their specific arrangement.
I am frequently surprised and bemused by the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid confrontation (including myself). This poem explores such impractical behaviour by having a frantic, violent stranger barge into the house next door, which prompts the lawful owner to hide. Neither of these situations are reasonably discussed or approached for rational resolution. "Best leave it. It will probably blow over, if you just do nothing, right?" In the current climate, it's probably worth stating that the title is geographical rather than political.
While it might be considered a salute to Stoicism, my intention was to prompt consideration of the idea that most people carry around unaddressed memories. I wanted to encourage a reader to question whether it is healthy to open up all their stored crates of psychological distress. Is it better to bury overwhelming emotions and move on, leaving them in the past? Do suppressed memories still guide our behaviour, even when they remain unacknowledged? Whatever you believe, the title is solid practical advice.
I chose simple language to beat a drum to warn the reader about dragons. I think it's the sort of poem you might hear chanted by a soldier marching her way to war, or a storyteller in a tavern who hopes that someone will pay for his dinner. I believe there is a sublime horror within the idea of literally existing in a world with maleficent creatures that are so unstoppably powerful. The nameless narrator lives in a dangerous world where monsters slaughter, pillage and selfishly devour the world's goodness. So do we.
I wanted to play with the awful vast nature of black holes and human curiosity. I decided to depict an experiment where spaceships fly into a black hole in an attempt to travel a great distance; the notion is that all the information of the ship and its crew will be compressed by gravity into a tiny energetic line of particles that can thread through a miniscule hole in space-time. Are they successful? Do they survive? How will they reassemble, if they make it through? All very reasonable questions. Isn't human curiosity a wonderful thing?
A large part of my childhood was based near the River Ouse, literally downstream from where Virginia Woolf drowned herself. I wanted to offer a sense of that landscape, heavy with the presence of the dead and scattered with fragments of past lives (including hers).
Most of my life has been spent living close to the sea; combine this with my deep interest in mythology and it was inevitable that something watery and mysterious would eventually trot out of my imagination. In several ancient mythologies, white horses are associated with crashing waves and/or death. With this in mind, I chose a rhythm intended to evoke heartbeats and hoof beats, hoping to carry the reader along on a breathless ride. Mirrorland is an imagined place beneath the reflective surface of water, where ancient people threw offerings to their gods and ancestors.