Siegfried Baber The Twice-Turned Earth January 2025. 32 pp. ISBN-13 978-3-901993-85-5 £7.50 (+ 2.00 p&p), €7.50 (+ 2.00 p&p), US$11.00 (+ 3.50 p&p)   "Baber's poems inhabit a rural landscape at once both bucolic and threatening, where nature moves in its own sweet time and the human condition is to wait: for a drought to break, for a ruined tree to regrow, for the return of a schoolfriend who has passed away. Memories are revised, 'ransacked' and re-evaluated with both wit and tenderness. The book oozes with Baber's trademark originality and eclecticism, and in the end we are left with everything to hope for and a strong sense of carpe diem." Robin Houghton "As a song writer of some renown, (ha! The fools), I'm often asked my opinions on modern poets. The vast majority of them leave me cold, but one definitely doesn't. That's Siegfried Baber. His lines are like miniature films, seemingly edited out of sequence, or as stills we see exposed momentarily when he pulls back the curtain. The jumble of views are like tumbling postcards, for you to order in your head. When you do, the impression will linger with you for minutes, hours, days and months. Even years. Siegfried Baber is the real thing." Andy Partridge, XTC "A long-overdue follow-up to his fine debut pamphlet, Siegfried Baber's sophomore collection, The Twice-Turned Earth, finds him, once more, in sure-footed and impressive form. This is a poetry of quick-eyed detail and imaginative connectivity; of quiet transcendence and mature restraint, wherein his Hardyesque sensitivity to time and emotional heft repeatedly finds its contemporary home and significance. Freighted with nuance and intelligent engagement, this is old-school, mightily impressive work." Martin Malone

Order copies of The Twice-Tuned Earth via PayPal

Table of Contents

Excerpts from The Twice-Turned Earth

Memento Mori

After the Selborne yew came down
its parish plundered the whole thing
like a car sacked for spare parts:
branch and bark became an altar screen
or a silent hanging cross; pilgrims
and druids and day-tripping drop-outs
came for whatever small scraps
remained: a well-preserved lance of wood,
seven berries, the stamen's yellow
and toxic shroud. Consummatum est
another scourged Son stripped
of his seamless robe; his woven crown.
For a few more days, it tried growing back
through the hollowed ghost of itself
but those torn-out roots wouldn't take.
People watched, waited, soon drifted away.
By the churchyard wall, a plaque
marks the day the resurrection failed.
 

Famous Blue Duffel Coat

When I was young and unemployed and feeling sinister
I'd drink coffee from a styrofoam cup
on the steps of St John the Evangelist before afternoon Mass,
and if it rained I'd wear my famous blue duffel coat.
The waitress from the café on the corner of Queens' Square
told me she had one exactly like it, only red
and with a button missing. She worked on Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Saturdays, always smiled, always pressed the change
into the palm of my hand like a blessing
and always sat in the third row from the back
and lit a candle for her baby brother. Something was wrong
with the blood in his bones. When he died, I never saw her again.
These days I make a donation to the church fund,
cross myself once, maybe twice, and slip back outside
into the sunshine. Now I drink milkshakes in a park near the river,
work in a laundrette on the smart side of town
and if it rains today, I'll let it soak me right down to my skin.