With others in your absence tells the story of a return to the living, travelling out of the acuteness of grief into new ways of being towards others. Moving forwards and occasionally backwards in time, it celebrates the platonic relationships through which the speaker learns to readjust to a world made strange following the loss of a parent. Many of the poems are very loosely based on seasons 11–14 of the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who, each drawing its title and imagery from a different serial.
Excerpt from '2017' Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. It’s been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him ‘father’, and anyway, ‘dad’ sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead can’t be addressed as lyric people.
Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when you’ve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple that’s fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.