Story and Poem of the Month

This month a great writer and very much valued ABCtales editor, Vera Clark, has done the hard yards and provided us with March's winners.  

Here's her rationale:

This month’s picks bring us two different literary genres written with style, authenticity and impact. Not only do they provide excellent writing and content but secondly, they employ experimental form to showcase elegance and intelligence. Both pieces grabbed me by my ears and gave me something new and very powerful, something that will resonate long after I’ve logged out and returned to the ho hum drum of my day.

Bear’s arresting poem creates Gothic romanticism shot through with haunting and loss. ‘Oh Lovers’ features lovers on the moors and a sense of internal anguish belied by the natural setting. The opening scene is drawn with hints of terror and the supernatural; a dog that won’t walk where evil lives, a crow, omen of death and conflict that circles above stagnation. The narrator manipulates us, we’re puppets to an unfolding murder, but whom and what and there’s that unmistakeable sense of generic mockery at play. Was it a long dead lover’s neck or literature itself that finally got knifed? Bear’s not telling but god damn it felt good to ‘slip my knife blade’ in. Poetic restraint and selectivity is always at work – only three stanzas to provide billows of chilly atmosphere, a darkening relationship and a deliciously self-indulgent spot of murder.

http://www.abctales.com/story/bear/oh-lover

Blackjack Davey’s beguiling ‘Wolf-pack’ paints the ordinary with the miraculous in an assured narrative voice that both courts and betrays. Enchanted realism, fairytale or fantastical social satire, it fits sweetly within all genres but I’d be reluctant to try to box in this beast of an authorial voice when you can ride the hairy backs of leering wolves instead and out trot all of society in a perpetual winter. Structurally, there’s a sustained moral code and irony is laced amongst the social decay with a light touch; the rapidly multiplying wolf species brings propaganda, there’s child abduction, a spurious affair, murderous villains and an unreliable politician – sorry, narrator - facing up to a jagged justice system. It’s all there, oh cruel world. There are no happy ever afters’ here but the rich language is thoroughly immersing, a lavish treat in fact and you howl to the close desperate to ‘loll out your tongue’ and taste more of Mr Davey’s literary North snow.  

http://www.abctales.com/story/blackjack-davey/wolf-pack

Congratulations to both writers and a big thank you!

Peter.