Poems Found In The Ruins Of A Pagan Commune edited by Varley Miese
Wyncott Farm must have seemed perfect for a pagan retreat, given the Broad Link stone circle in a copse on the land. But as the poems that survive document, its inhabitants quickly found themselves fighting the implacable forces they themselves had roused.
THE DARKNESS OF TRUE PRIMAL PAGANISM
In June 1971 a young, idealistic commune moved into Wyncott Farm in south west England. It soon descended into chaos. By the time fire gutted the main building 40 months later, all its members had perished or fled.
Our sole window into the events at Wyncott are the papers one member hid in the ruins. Here we witness its demise as a series of snapshot images, each more twisted and macabre than the last. At first we see kids building a new life for themselves. But their faces change. Their countenances darken. Their features slur and distort. Eventually we do not recognize them as human at all.
Something terrifying certainly did happen to the Wyncott Farm commune. After three years it was gone, leaving no light-trails behind it. Was it flung outwards, or was it sucked into that root-tangled valley?
For the first time in this volume, historian Varley Miese transcribes the commune’s secret stash of poems and invocations. His introduction places the documents in context, and raises the possibility that the commune might have succeeded in its aims. That something was invoked from the standing stones in Broad Link Copse. That it came down from the long-slumbering hills and seeped into the farmhouse. That these people opened a channel into the unremembered ritual past, but instead of gods they summoned monsters.
Poems Found In The Ruins Of A Pagan Commune takes folk horror to a new level of immediacy and emotional connection. An explicit rejection of neo-pagan “druids and maypoles” playacting, it taps authentically into the dark gods of the fields.
39,000 words : 324 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B07VB148PB
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EXCERPTS
Broad Link At Dawn
stripper girl
gradually revealing the white
tan-lines of the morning sky
laid dimpling
to the knotty crests
where glints the milk-sour stream
stretched flat
ripening its summer buds
in baskets in secret hedgerows
reaches outward
finger ridges clenched in loam
steaming pools where fish flap
wants the sun
prickling sharp-nosed vinegar hills
to thrust spears in abandoned fortresses
curls the trees to triangles
speckled lips
swollen from a first kiss
Making Chains
The bee’s fat back dimples
Viridian clover, dolls
Syrupy balsam, doodles
Pregnant crochets of dandelion clocks.
Trees smear ochre into skies
Scuffed with contrails, mix
Dazzle-bleached primaries, muddle
Russet leaves and sun-smacked hills.
Where my bare legs sprout
Pinafores from the meadow’s loom,
Money spiders prickle, split
Daisy stalks, serenade
Midge-thick shadows, spin
Soft bare wrinkles under the hem of my skirt.
I’m all champagne and marigolds
Laid thrumming by a first lover
Murmuring busy nothings
To the bright-decked stream,
Dipping one luxurious finger
In the water’s hurrying pink.
Alarums
Hammered to the door of the night’s
Godless cathedral, the soul’s blank cries
Move on the notches of the blade’s fastness—
If you couldn’t draw it, you’d saw it off at the hilt
In fear of others. Now the pounding again,
Merlin’s alarums from a Wales
Sliding gravel into the black channel
Where bluestone barges flame over bottomless
Obsidian mirrors and sunken quarries:
The pounding, which means the keening,
Which means the mourning of the dead
In huts of dry cauldrons and fox heads
Turned to teasels—Terry’s on the landing
Like a cartwheel dog in a tree’s fold
Waiting, counting seconds, as if for thunder.
One more boom. That’s it. That’s always it.
Except this leap night’s fusillade
Cycles again. There’s someone in the yard,
A blonde sleepwalker in pyjamas.
I run down the box of the stairs
To the bright barrage of the heaving barrow,
Terry at my heels—spins me groping
The scullery bolt, Arthur’s idiot brother
With a hacksaw—“Don’t let it in the house—”
By The Ankle
Someone’s screaming in Cistern Field.
All night I hear the grief
Of a wet nurse with another child
Fixed gnawing at her breast.
The ones who starved her pay her.
Once when I crawl out
I see lanterns waving wildly
Among the elder trees, casting vast
Silhouettes of the pillbox on the clouds.
The elms stomp over to block my view,
Old men with angry faces.
The screams slash into silence,
Then the sudden retort
Of a body flung on the roof of the barn.
39,000 words : 324 pages
eBook
Amazon search code: B07VB148PB
Buy at Amazon US : $7.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Buy at Amazon UK : £6.99 (free on Kindle unlimited)
Paperback
Amazon search code: 1077763549
Buy at Amazon US : $13.99
Buy at Amazon UK : £11.99
active maas 