Mollie Charane, and Other Ballads

These are the old stories, the ones that survived because someone had to sing them. Collected in the early twentieth century and steeped in the oral tradition, this volume gathers ballads that have traveled through centuries on the tongues of singers and storytellers. The title poem tells of Mollie Charane, a miser from the Isle of Man whose stinginess became legend, yet who ultimately left his wealth to his daughter, a dark joke about death's equalizing power, wrapped in a haunting refrain that echoes through every stanza. Other pieces venture into hallowed ground: Saint Jacob performing miracles, souls in transformation, figures caught between the mortal world and something older and stranger. Love appears as possession and loss. Death arrives without warning. The supernatural bleeds through like fog off the moors. These are morality tales dressed in mystery, their lessons embedded in rhythm and repetition rather than explanation. The language feels ancient even when the words are new, conjuring a world where every gold coin has a ghost attached to it, where the dead speak from under the sods, where loneliness is a landscape rather than a feeling. For readers who believe that the best poetry doesn't explain itself but simply sits in the blood like an old song.