A few excerpts:

 

CRAB    

 

‘sea critter, skittering on a picnicky stretch

stops.  A clay pot atop  crick claws, typing 

its pincery script like rain 

pittering on plasticky macks’

 

 

APPLE 

       

‘sealed in cider-tight skin, they thrum

 and drumroll in the juddering barrel,

 are sucked in the spluttering juice-press’  

 

 

PIG

 

                           ‘...Fattening 

in their sleep, on apple pulp, up-

bucketed and guzzled, they bristle,

hot-breathed, snouting in a heap.’     

 

 

OYSTER  

 

‘This fan of ruffled rock, its frills

  set stiff with salt and time and tide’

 

‘shucked with a slate scrape its seem rips’

 

‘our gullets awash, gulping these

   slippery nuggets of sea-flesh’ 

 

 

 

HOW IT ALL STARTED...

 

The first time I was mesmerised by how the rhythm and textures of words

can conjure a real experience in the mind’s ear was reading these lines in

 Virgil’s Aeneid:

“quadrupedantem putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum”  - which translates as

something like “the hooves of the four-footed horses, drumming the dust of the plains.”

But you hardly need to translate it to know, as the sounds of the words

almost tell you themselves.

 

I wanted to do the same.  It is the sound of an experience, or natural

phenomenon, or even the texture of an object, which impels me to

recreate that in words:  food and its source provide endless inspiration!