white flowers is charlie baylis’ eighth pamphlet. The poems find him “sitting in a palace on top of the sun”, delighting in his customary rich & evocative imagery. white flowers comes with a heavy emotional resonance, as the poet makes peace with his father’s suicide and the death of his older sister. The pamphlet is a monument to survival where baylis treads lightly along the footsteps of his heroes lorca and rilke, where every line is underwritten by hope and every word blows like a white petal in the wind which whispers: overcome.

Some poets write buoyantly; others convey the heaviness of grief and injustice. charlie baylis masters both modes at once. In this way, and others, he captures the feeling of being alive – the physicality, the emotionality, the flux of identity through experience and, most of all, our great capacity for love and compassion. – Kathryn Maris

Baylis’ characteristically flamboyant pamphlet spins, like its own white petals, clockwise through grief, memory, and reluctant love: intimate, unguarded, cosmic, and intoxicated. A necklace shimmers between satire and sincerity, its “inner peace” both suspect and real. The poet is unmade by bereavement – ‘alone in the beautiful world’ – but is also remade, defiant, in dark play. In a painterly apocalypse, life insists, colour prevails, and this mythical and elegiac sequence drips gold. – Geraldine Clarkson

34pp