Fossil Sunshine

Selwicks Bay

Like veins of fat in a hock of ham
fault lines score down heaved chalk cliffs
and across the thick shore platform.
The flints are uniform, and calcite clefts
indicate the brecciated crush zone
occurring to the south of the west-east
latitude of tectonic disturbance.
It’s highly complex, to say the least.
But there’s a rhythm in the chalk –
soft and harder beds, nodules, wispy marls,
alternating flints – regular as clocks
that mark a record of Cretaceous cycles:
the whole Earth’s orbit accurately ranged,
these frequencies a pace-maker for change.

Published: 02 October 2013
ISBN: 978 1 905208 20 3
Pages: 36

“Read these poems!” – Times Literary Supplement

“The language employed by this poet is powerfully tactile.  These are strong and in every sense grounded poems which are also capable of transformative action and insight into the bedrock of our life experience.  For what lies under the soles of our shoes and the foundations of our houses but bedrock?  Be his subject a calendar year depicting erosions or a prose poem about a fossil sea sponge, the reader is engaged and enthralled by the range and consideration that gives each poem its specific and enthralling individuality.”

Penelope Shuttle

“Fossil Sunshine shows the ground beneath our feet in a whole new light. In these poems, the language of geology is both poetic and political: basalt and limestone, quartz and jasper become urgent works of art. Michael McKimm’s words ring against the rocks.”

Erica Wagner