Nocturnals

The present collection emerged from my participation in one of the 2020 Two Sylvias Press Advent Calendar poetry prompts events. Over the same period, I gained audio-visual insight into contemporary and historical MR repertoires through my engagement with a 'Magical Realism' Facebook community of international artistic practitioners and scholars. My interest in the ways contemporary developments in MR art-scenes have enlarged understandings of 'amplification' to include both enhancements of reality and an escape from it (rather than exclusively an attachment to place, as is the case with the original definition of the term), features prominently in Nocturnals. Nocturnals treats place attachment with suspicion for its production of small-mindedness and resentment towards change. At the same time, it does not seek to denigrate belonging, but approach it from the perspective of a world traveller into myth and popular cultural trivia.