Cultured Llama

Richard Thomas with his daughter, Emmeline. Photo by Karen Stone

We are proud of all our authors, but particularly proud of Richard Thomas’s blog piece for the Huffington Post, ‘Zygote Poems – a Journey of New Fatherhood’ . This short collection moved us to tears during the book’s production, and once again the Cultured Llama editors were misty-eyed when we read Richard’s contribution.

Here is an extract from the article:

I mostly made notes for poems over the following ten months, amongst changing nappies, night-time feeds, bathtimes, and making bottles – all of which I got very quick at – after a while, you can pretty much do it blindfolded. Some nappy changes are a potent exception though, and require a few more baby wipes than planned. The night-time feeds soon become second nature too – you think you can’t possibly adapt to living on such little sleep but you do – I even sleepwalked and answered the door to the health visitor in my boxers:

…
it had been a long milk-filled Tyme-slot
and sleepwalking had become

an action I was taking to well –
all I can hope
is that I was suitably dressed

when I opened Home Entrance with
my sense barely open and
totally not conscious,

(From ‘Health Visitor (Shape Caller)’)

Richard later goes on to talk about how his experience of extreme anxiety, as well as that of new fatherhood, shaped the poems:

To make the collection even more personal, I began to think about something that has affected me for a long time – anxiety – a health issue a lot of people dismiss as ‘just being silly’. The truth is: it can be suffocating, your brain can fog over, and you can freeze in fright. I thought it would be empowering to explore that. So, there are two strands to the collection – charms, and anxieties. To try and explain anxiety, I wrote all numerical words – something that turns my mind to cotton – phonetically. This anxious spelling also doubles up as ‘baby language’:

Nothing about you is Mehtrik, you are
pure, unaccustomed, whole and gentle in
your touch on your Calunderr, just as the
wind scurrying around you like awe-
gobbed mice, attending to your Duzun, is
gentle…

(From ‘Furhst Burhfdae Sohnnit’)

You can read the full post here: Zygote Poems – a Journey of New Fatherhood.

Zygote Poems costs only £5 plus p&p and can be ordered at the book’s page: Zygote Poems.

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