The Brother Avenged, and Other Ballads

These are old songs, and they sound it. The Brother Avenged opens the collection with something primal: a man who watches his brother die, who takes up the blade, who disappears into the green dark of the woods with blood on his hands. It's a ballad that knows how revenge circles back on itself, how the outlaw lives in the shadows of the trees he once called home. But this collection isn't only about vengeance. The Eyes pleads with a lover through verses that ache with wanting, while The Elf Bride spins a tale of magic and mischief that feels pulled from some fireside telling centuries old. These are narrative poems that wear their folk roots openly, drawing on the rhythms of oral tradition where every repeated phrase and rising action was designed to be heard, not just read. The natural world runs through them like a thread: forests as refuge and trap, rivers as witnesses, the moon as companion to the lonely. What endures is their directness. No wasted words. No modern distance. Just the raw machinery of human feeling rendered in a voice that has somehow survived the years.