Votive Evelyn Shakir and the mourners gather on

and the mourners gather on Church Island in the Caribbean for her wake

over the still-rigid ground

out of as many languages as possible

He covered the international music scene for Billboard magazine for over 27 years and he has written more than 500 album notes and hundreds of articles for a wide range of jazz magazines in North America and Europe

Votive Evelyn Shakir and the mourners gather onTurning on the drawn out thread of a relationship in freefall, the poems in Votive, the skilful and seductive second collection by Keiran Goddard, are small prayers uttered out of an ambiguous faith. They are dreams, visions, and hallucinations; the body is made a bonsai tree, the sea hisses into the spaces between the lines, the voice speaks invocations to the minute. These poems are granular things that flow freely when touched. Unapologetically