Sonic Poetry occupies the territory between poetry, music and oral storytelling, allowing each form to retain its own identity while altering the way the others are experienced.
In Alistair's work, the poem is the primary structure. Voice, melody, folk instrumentation and atmospheric sound operate around the language, extending its emotional and psychological dimensions rather than converting it into conventional song.
Rooted in the narrative traditions of Irish storytelling, his Sonic Poetry examines memory, landscape, nature, the animal world and human behaviour. Its surrealism arises not from invented worlds, but from the peculiarities of lived experience: the details we notice, the associations we make, and the unexpected significance that ordinary events acquire when revisited through memory.
The events are real. The strangeness lies in how they were observed — and how memory chose to preserve them.
Riversdale began with the poems themselves, written and crafted over a period of more than ten years. From that body of work came the musical ideas and a clear sense of how each poem should inhabit its own sound world.
Over six months of production, I developed and manipulated musical arrangements within an AI-assisted studio environment, then worked directly with the resulting individual stems—selecting, editing, restructuring and shaping the material around the voice and the narrative of each poem. The use of AI was deliberate: these poems seemed particularly suited to a form in which technology could assist their delivery without becoming their centre, allowing the words room to breathe and the story within each poem to remain paramount.
The tracks were subsequently assembled and mixed by me, balancing vocals, instrumentation, dynamics and atmosphere before being prepared for final mastering. AI formed part of the creative toolkit, but the poetry, conception, artistic direction, arrangement decisions, sound engineering, editing and final mix were shaped by my own creative judgement.
Ultimately, these poems are intended to live in more than one form: as Sonic Poetry shaped through sound, as poems held physically on the printed page, and as performance poetry given new life in the presence of an audience.
A psychologically impressionistic poem in which memory operates through fragments, sensory detail and surreal association. Beneath its observational humour lies a quieter emotional landscape, where childhood experience is reconstructed through the strange, selective logic of remembering.
Saltlight
Gold Hollywood curtains:
upholstery beneath plastic skin.
Crooked teeth—
dry-stone walls slip shifting, bone by bone.
Mirrored vans,
carpet rolled, Swiss-roll tight,
copper pots, minted light.
Fortune teller, tar-black hair
tangled in Claddagh gold.
Signpost arms point nowhere,
black-shawl directions,
the tongue of Connacht tacked to the weather’s grin.
Mum’s hair lacquered; fly spray.
Italians hitch the sun’s heat in paper grease.
Rain—
r
i
c
e.
We slept, packed in silver.
Crows
lift
golf balls,
mistaking moons.
Ragworms,
pincers, pliers.
Sprats glitter,
the sea’s small change.
Fifty wands for water;
I reeled a seagull,
wings thrashing for my borrowed seas.
The coastline grinned; voices echoed,
hooking a dancing mackerel;
a seal bent it, barking applause,
vanished in saltlight.
Citroën 2CV Charleston—
a lady bronzed to chestnut, uncorking red light;
her home galloped on chrome.
Leaving Sunday,
a drift of caravans, heavy with our silences,
each one—towing its own
ghostlight: all we didn’t say.
All we didn't say.
All we didn't say.
© Alistair Sherwood 2026. All rights reserved.
A comic, perceptive poem about projection, recognition and the uneasy boundary between observer and observed. Through mimicry and absurd humour, a childhood encounter becomes a small reversal of perspective, in which the human gaze unexpectedly finds itself looking back.
Orangutang
I’ve been saying it wrong, Orangutang,
as if a tail might make it mine.
We met on a school trip to Dublin Zoo;
the keeper said you refused other males—
a reasonable philosophy.
I’ve been spelling it wrong, bannanas—
a word collapsing under its own weight.
You had a bunch in your mouth,
skins hanging like yellowed teeth,
each one an open parenthesis.
I had the flu; you watched me blow my nose,
that soft white flag of human frailty.
I threw the tissue over the rail
and heckled—
uh uh uh,
a crude translation of my reflection.
Everyone laughed you offstage.
You picked it up, blew your nose,
wiped your bottom,
and threw it back—
your timing, immaculate.
© Alistair Sherwood 2026. All rights reserved.
A poem about the tension between imposed order and an imagination that refuses to conform. What begins in the rigid world of rules and correction becomes, through memory, an exploration of how language can fracture its boundaries and discover freedom in the very act of breaking them.
THE GRAMMAR OF DEFIANCE
Five chalk-sticks
aligned beside the blackboard—
not missiles, exactly,
but close enough.
Her fingers—
thumb and middle—
white as chalk cliffs,
losing themselves to weather.
Dust hung in the air,
unsure whose side
it was on.
She lifts one.
The room listens.
This is how language works,
she says.
Frontlines.
Fault-lines.
A sentence must know
where it stands.
I am the exception
she cannot diagram—
a misprinted dictionary,
letters in retreat,
logic leaking
through the margins.
She twists my ear.
A small correction.
In the name
of clarity.
Yet something
in her sternness
shook—
as if she too lived
under rules
she could not name.
In one letter
and out the logic—
that's you.
Sometimes the letters
rearranged themselves
the moment
she looked away.
I try to hold
the shape of her insult—
it shifts.
You'll be a metaphor
nobody understands,
she tells me,
and something in the room
shifts—
chalk-dust rising,
proof scattered
in the air.
Years later,
I think of her
as I let loose a line,
letting it run
where it shouldn’t.
I write now
with the bruise of her lessons
quiet in the grain—
a faint inheritance
of weather.
Her lessons
still there,
thin and white,
breaking,
breaking,
against the page.
And in the fracture,
language survives—
not through obedience,
but through escape.
© Alistair Sherwood 2026. All rights reserved.
Riversdale — Ireland, 10 Sonic Poems, Vol. 1