That’s what we call a can-doe attitude! Congratulations, Pascale!

The tune would appear to be ‘It’s a Kind of Torment’, except the octopus radiates a sublime indifference
throughout with the occasional suggestion of magisterial control:

‘Shrimp me, Loser.’
‘Activate the crab elevator.’
‘Cease your twanging.’

Bharti Kher: Ancestor | Yorkshire Sculpture Park Being a mother and being a woman makes me who I am as an artist. Art is a manifestation of being alive and feeling your way through things. Ancestor is des

Somewhere between votary figure and composite sculpture, #BhartiKher’s piece seems to dance between definitions:

ysp.org.uk/art-outdoors...

#ArtSonnetChain #TishaniDoshi @yspsculpture.bsky.social

Art Sonnet Chain, 5: Tishani Doshi after Bharti Kher’s Ancestor Heart and eye braided in ampersandthe way descendant and ancestor link handsacross waves of mitochondrial inheritance.Here is an abdomen, a thorax; herdof stampeding bu…

The 2nd quartet of our #ArtSonnetChain opens with this fine poem by #TishaniDoshi (who also contributed to our #EcoSonnetChain).

As you might expect at this point, it shifts parameters to focus on one of #BhartiKher’s ‘Intermediary’ figures:

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2026/04/18/a...

Seemingly casual observations resonate thruout Dianne Casey’s sequence, like this on glass paperweights:

On the sideboard
they always looked dangerous.

I used to think about one slipping,
dropping straight
onto my foot.

Or breaking open,
a whole, sealed-off world inside.

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue

Peter McCarey hints at an abecedary of cruelties, including the criminal cynicism of the double tap strategy:

Little souls you ought to know
Not to return to the scene before the second
Strike, the one for luck,
For lucky relatives and absolutely
Clueless hi-viz vesters.

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies

Dianne Elizabeth Casey: Sideboard 1Mr Sheen workedinto the wood,into the edges,until it caught the light.Glass paperweightsgold frameseverything held in place.School photos lined up,smilingbecause we were told to.A drinks cabinetno…

Dianne Casey’s concise sketch of a sideboard and its attributes reveals it as a symbol of not-so-subtle domestic control, whether of identity or behaviour:

ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2026/04/14/d...

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue

Those are Capercaillies, and they’re on Mars.

The Martian Capercaillie has a haunting cry, due to there being only trace levels of oxygen.

Peter McCarey: Enemies of Righteousness and Our Great Nation H is a hateful thing. It slewA thousand of my kin. H isFor hospitals that hid them notThe heads of little children tooShot through with lead not light. The wayThe way you look tonight you’dThink I …

In between #ArtSonnetChain posts, Peter McCarey returns to our #FallOfAmerica theme in the sorry wake of the latest aggression (if only anyone responsible was or could actually be sorry):

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2026/04/11/p...

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies

Excellent stuff. We all knew lavender was rude thanks to the song: ‘Lavender’s rude, gilly gilly, lavender’s mean…’

Sorry to hear that, Helen. Here’s a small sending of strength however that’s supposed to get there:

#DundeeIsScrievin - and then readin it out loud… at this:

Today is publication day for our new Expanded Edition of Scenes from a Long Sleep: New & Collected Poems by Peter Didsbury, published to celebrate his 80th birthday!

shorturl.at/WwLgi

Includes the collection A Fire Shared (2020) as well as new, previously uncollected poems.

Happy eightieth birthday to that fine poet Peter Didsbury, from Sean O’Brien, me, and all the contributors to During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, a Festschrift in his honour published by Broken Sleep Books. Hoping he enjoys the work we have taken such pleasure in secretly assembling.

I think he’s there for scale.

You’ve reminded me of this snap I took kind of for #Easter of the biggest dug in the wee-est snug.

(Yes, the dog _is_ wearing an #EasterBunny outfit. Because it is a top hound.)

#Dundee #HoundsOfDundee #StarAndGarter

It’s only just begun to be sold in recent years and is a little on the pricey side.

Their gin and vodka is more affordable. (Their pea gin starts as many peas and ends much the same way.)

Talking of which, I saw this fine example of the chair/steps at #Arbikie Distillery the other day.

James Thomson (‘B.V.’ of #CityOfDreadfulNight ‘fame’) has a poem, ‘In the Room’, in which each of the items of furniture in a dead man’s room is given a voice - but who would voice them?

www.theotherpages.org/poems/thomso...

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue

I think it’s gathered in the volume ‘What the Furniture Said’.

You used to see it on the bookshelves in furniture stores, but now they mostly don’t use real books.

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue

‘Nobody puts Baby Cupboard in a corner,’ as I believe Patrick Swayze once said.

If it doesn’t take a day to understand the extra level of rules then why do we even have holidays in the first place?

(And all on a post-storm #EasterSunday - rebalancing things on a weekend dominated by war, its horrors and overblown rhetoric, religion with its totalising urbi et orbi-isms, and science’s gestural orbiting of our nearby satellite…)

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies #ArtSonnetChain

Linda’s sonnet ingeniously picks up the materiality of @sophieherx.bsky.social’s opening collage and the developing argument of sonnets 2 & 3 (by @kaddybenyon.bsky.social & @tamaryoseloff.bsky.social) and focusses those in the graphic quality of a typewritten text - remember those?

#ArtSonnetChain

Art Sonnet Chain, 4: Linda France Linda France’s latest collections include Laurel Prize winner The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack, 2022) and Startling (Faber & New Writing North, 2022), which includes work f…

We’re delighted to welcome back our #EcoSonnetChain editor, #LindaFrance, to conclude the opening quartet of our #ArtSonnetChain.

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2026/04/04/a...

Sigrun Hodne: French Garden Poem Sigrun Hodne is a Norwegian artist working at the intersection of drawing and found text. Her practice explores how language can function as material and how images can be read as utterances, often…

As the first of several updates this #Easter weekend, we’re delighted to welcome a wibbly-wobbly and/or knockity-kneed table or tables to the #GhostFurnitureCatalogue, c/o Sigrun Hodne’s perfectly-matched drawings+texts:

ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2026/03/30/s...

Another week, another cabinet.

But, after our previous, surreal if somewhat snippy, cabinet, Jo Colley has caught a whiff of something much worse - and, tragically, topical - about this latest item of furniture:

ghostfurniturecatalogue.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/j...

#GhostFurnitureCatalogue

@tamaryoseloff.bsky.social’s sonnet to #AnaMendieta ends on such a strong last line. Here’s the build to that, plus an image from @tate.bsky.social:

…Blood sister, you bloom
in flame, sprout feathers and fly, incite
a riot of blossom. Here you never die…

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies #ArtSonnetChain

Art Sonnet Chain, 3: Tamar Yoseloff Silueta (i.m. Ana Mendieta 1948 –1985) Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last either:both consigned to earth. And it was earthyou desired, plunging your body in mudto restage your birth, to mess with …

Our third poem is by @tamaryoseloff.bsky.social and is in memoriam #AnaMendieta. It picks up the themes of the #ArtSonnetChain so far and restates them with equal lyrical grace and still greater urgency:

newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2026/03/21/a...

#NewBootsAndPantisocracies

‘Touch not the veiled crab cabinet.
Henry dared that sulky afternoon…’

Gorey meets Belloc? some would ask, in a cautious manner. Snip snap! others would reply, sharply.

Diane Cockburn revisits the #GhostFurnitureCatalogue.