About
The difficult fifth collection of poems. Special thanks to Mollie Baxter, Ron Baker, Sarah Fiske and Simon Kurt Unsworth of the Monkeyrack writers' group for advice and feedback in the creation of these pieces.
Andrew Michael Hurley reviews A Silence Black As Milk
"Hadley reins in the abstraction well to make what are complex ideas seem straightforward, as though they are things we have always noticed about the world. But they aren't. And that is the poet doing his job well."
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Cuckoo
He knows to cuckoo
not by imitation but, my instinct tells me, instinct.
Notwithstanding Freud, he'll not attempt to mate
within his foster kind - he'll know his type
though never having peered
into a decent mirror.
He will scan another bar-code chest
and swell with corresponding lust.
Perhaps, wound tight inside
the warbler's briefly unwatched nest
his mother left a goodbye lullaby
that shook the crystal-lattice of his eggshell memory
before he turned the fattened gangster-child, the murderer
gone courting for a murderess.