C.L. Dallat, poet, musician and critic, was born in Ballycastle, County Antrim and now lives in London where has reviewed literature and the arts regularly for the TLS and Guardian among others, and has been a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review since its inception in 1998. He won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition in 2006 and his latest collection is The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff Press, 2009).

Dandelion Clock

If once in the runnels of years
in a silver light something like this,
on catching a soupçon of glance
that might have disproved you can’t
ever know what the person
closest to you really feels,
if he’d woven, at that very point
in the fractions that make up a life,
a tentative net of abstractions
to fling at the exiting moment,
at the light illusory flittering
schmetterling of oncelongago
as it quivered above, behind,
out of range of their hesitant gaze
and out through a sliver of sun
between curtains on anodized rails
they’d have bought at a paintshop in Redcar –
perhaps then he’d have known for sure.

from The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff Press 2009)