Tormentil

By Ian Humphreys

'I can't face the big stuff so I comb the moors for a tiny yellow flower' – so begins Tormentil, the second poetry collection by Ian Humphreys. Set largely in the starkly beautiful West Yorkshire moorlands, these poems creep and bloom across geographies and time. Isolated by grief in the first months of the pandemic, Humphreys goes in search of hope and blessings among the burnt heather, tumbledown mills and canal locks near his home in the Calder Valley. He unearths a landscape of wildflowers and wildlife, a soundscape of rain and birdsong, at once healing, threatening and under threat.
These are richly textured poems of living and resisting, anchored by connections to family, food, community – and an acknowledgement of the precarious root-holds of hard-won freedoms. A soaring, defiant hymn to recovery, this vital book contemplates migration, otherness, and all the internal and external elements that bind us, make us unique.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913437794

Ian Humphreys

Ian Humphreys’ debut poetry collection Zebra (Nine Arches Press) was nominated for the Portico Prize. His second collection, Tormentil won a Royal Society of Literature ‘Literature Matters’ Award while in progress. He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry and the producer and co-editor of After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath, both published by Nine Arches Press. In 2023, Ian was appointed Writer in Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. He is widely published in journals and anthologies, and has written for the BBC. Ian is a fellow of The Complete Works.

Book preview

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Tormentil

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Tormentil

Ian Humphreys

ISBN: 978-1913437787

eISBN: 978-1913437794

Copyright © Ian Humphreys, 2023.

Cover artwork: Design by Jane Commane. Tormentil pictured in an antique illustration of medicinal and herbal plants, published in 1892 in Medicinal Plants of Russia. Scan by Ivan Burmistrov.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Ian Humphreys has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2023 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed on recycled paper in the United Kingdom by Imprint Digital.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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for Mum

Contents

Tormentil

Earthworm on tarmac

the grasshopper warbler’s song

First signs

Lady Luck

Bad egg

Wasp in a jam jar

Pansies

Hak gwai

Walltown

Petrified

Scrimshander

The other lot

On spilling a jug of Mai Tai plus half a pale ale over the new marketing director’s lap during her welcome drinks

desire

Liberté

Firecrest

There’s a walrus on my windscreen

The wood pigeon’s song

rubber pup at the Queer Rights in Chechnya rally

Babysitting in Ho Man Tin

Of course, I don’t mind

Remote

The sign language of trees

When trees burn

Punch and Judy on the West Yorkshire Moors

love hurts

Rope-grown mussels

Nomi

Grey matter

Paucity

Whose story?

Refrain

Discarded wardrobe on Deansgate

Wrong uns

Like a record, baby

Before leaving

Prayer for The Fabulous Ones

The Rochdale Canal

crazydream i

crazydream ii

tormentil +

The wave

Morning swim

Water brought me to you and