Nostoc by Daragh Breen Robert Macfarlane ‘a tree-shaped brightness dances’

‘a tree-shaped brightness dances’

These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic

Mostly they seem untroubled by their humble position

They dare you to visit

but they dwell only briefly in the familiar actual

Nostoc by Daragh Breen Robert Macfarlane ‘a tree-shaped brightness dances’Like the eponymous fungus that appears to be regurgitated by the Earth herself after rain, fragments of invented folklore and mongrel histories have stained through from Breens subconscious and come to bloom as a trio of sequences that deal, in turn, with mans tampering with Natures DNA through the selective breeding of dogs, societal fears of the witch figure, and the hopelessness of augury in the face of the inevitability of death. There are also