UNHOLYLAND
Slingshot hiphop is sweeping the Middle East, saying ‘putting down the gun and pickin up the mic’. Jalilah Zahlan, sweet sixteen-and-a-half, is stuck in a refugee camp in Beirut dreaming of expressing the agony of Palestinian exile through rap…read more
BODY OF WORK
There are 10 sections to Body Of Work, each named after a different somatic region. Subject matter is widely varied: there are urban poems, satirical and humourous verses, elegiac pieces, love poems, haikus and erotica, and a few longer pieces including ‘De Havilland’ (about the poet’s airman-father …read more
THE UNINHABITABLE CITY
“Other works have developed his unique ability to fuse an inspired romantic tradition with a gritty uber-modern reality, like The Uninhabitable City, where Dun’s Orphic voice can melt the tower blocks of a decaying city…read more
SALVIA DIVINORUM
An alchemical text in four movements…read more
VALE ROYAL
The valley of the lost Fleet River in Kings Cross is surrounded by the old hills of London, the high places. Vale Royal is a geographical vessel, a symbolic container of the quiet mind, a perfect place to realise the vision of oneness…read more
UNHOLYLAND
Slingshot hiphop is sweeping the Middle East, saying ‘putting down the gun and pickin up the mic’.
Jalilah Zahlan, sweet sixteen-and-a-half, is stuck in a refugee camp in Beirut dreaming of expressing the agony of Palestinian exile through rap. Simultanously, on the shores of Lake Galilee a young Jewish MC/DJ, Moshe Rambam, is preparing a Slingshot hiphop playlist to surprise guests at his 18th birthday party, half-suspecting some of his friends won’t appreciate the music – and the message – he loves.
The real Arab revolution is happening in an explosion of politico-spiritual rap from subculture.
And somewhere in the wings a love story is unfolding.
This is Unholyland.
‘I was deeply moved by Unholyland – it has extraordinary energy, wit, knowledge, and beautifully marries the vernacular with rhyme. It reads beautifully and is like nothing else I’ve read.’ – Tom Paulin
‘The Holy of Unholies’ – Philip Wells
‘A pyrotechnic, apocalyptic dance…. a powerful meditation on the place where civilization began and where it could end.’ – Heathcote Williams
BUY UNHOLYLAND
Edition: eBook – visit download page
BODY OF WORK
There are 10 sections to Body Of Work, each named after a different somatic region. There are poems of the Hands, poems of the Lungs, Spine, Heart and Belly, etc. Subject matter is widely varied: there are urban poems, satirical and humourous verses, elegiac pieces, love poems, haikus and erotica, and a few longer pieces including ‘De Havilland’ (about the poet’s airman-father who flew in night-fighting Mosquitoes in WWII). These are highly-crafted lucid verses which take the reader into an emotive landscape of literary vision; these are poems which clearly set out to communicate something of human experience.
Edition: eBook – visit download page
MCCOOL
McCool is a love story and a war story set in the near future, told in the form of a verse-novel. After a Western coalition invasion of Lebanon, Gala’s husband Colonel Parker James is deployed to the frontline and remains in the Middle East through summer and autumn. Anxious, lonely, childless, Galatea impulsively moves to London to resume a career as an art journalist where her path crosses that of the war painter McCool. As the narrative unfolds in sonnet-form a soldier becomes a pacifist, a tortured visionary develops a passion for pure beauty, and tragically, ecstatically, a woman becomes a goddess…
Sustaining and relishing the sonnet form throughout and telling such a brutally real yet imagistically exquisite and mythical tale in such a fresh, witty and deliciously modern way confirming him as the bravest, most lucid and deepest lyrical voice writing today.
Philip Wells
Again, Dun has told an epic tale in verse that is more than verse. Fusing elements of Gilgamesh, the Fenian cycle and Eugene Onegin, McCool is strikingly modern. 21st century art, war and love are explored in a ‘white goddess’ poem with London and Heliopolis as mystic backdrops. This is Byronic cinema.
Niall McDevitt
The launch of McCool – a video by Goldmark Art
THE UNINHABITABLE CITY
Other works have developed his unique ability to fuse an inspired romantic tradition with a gritty uber-modern reality, like The Uninhabitable City, where Dun’s Orphic voice can melt the tower blocks of a decaying city and refill the syringes of prostitutes with simple hope.
Philip Wells
UNIVERSAL
This epic poem, published by Goldmark in 2002, whirlwinds the reader through North Africa, the West Indies, India. Primarily a travelogue in blank-verse it detours into biographies.
This poem is noble, both in conception and execution, a dense weave of lived experience, serious philosophical and theological questioning, humour, knowledge of many different spiritual and cultural traditions, evocations of spectacular inward and outward journeys.
Hilary Davies – The London Magazine
Universal makes a fitting retort to recent suggestions that contemporary poets are not facing up to the big questions. Basil Bunting famously said of Pound’s Cantos, “There are the Alps, fools”; well, here are the Himalayas.
John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
VALE ROYAL
The valley of the lost Fleet River in Kings Cross is surrounded by the old hills of London, the high places. Vale Royal is a geographical vessel, a symbolic container of the quiet mind, a perfect place to realise the vision of oneness. In the poem Vale Royal the cosmic lifecycle of the Sunchild, the Mighty Youth, born with a vision and dying an early death, reflects the exiled life and redemption of the artist. Chatterton and Blake play his role in the work’s two movements.
Vale Royal moves with the ease and clarity of a fresh spring over ancient stones, making its myths casual even colloquial – an impressive achievement.
Derek Walcott
He has an extraordinary sense of the past. He’s one of those people, along with Blake and Chatterton and others, who are like a divining rod for history.
Peter Ackroyd
Order online – Goldmark