Upcoming Release: I Dreamed...

I Dreamed...

Coming in 2026

A striking and unflinching new poetry collection by S P Clark is set for release this year. I Dreamed… is not a book that sits quietly on the bedside table. It breathes, convulses and refuses to look away. Drawing its power from the shifting terrain between dream and waking, the collection offers readers an intimate descent into the private theatre of the subconscious, where fear, longing, shame and desire take on vivid, unsettling form.

Across a sequence of dream visions, the speaker encounters white silhouettes emerging from coal darkness, clouds that promise comfort yet collapse beneath the weight of hope, and fields of lava that answer prayer with silence. The imagery is cinematic and often surreal, but the emotional register is painfully human. The poems move fluidly between tenderness and terror, from erotic memory to existential dread, from grotesque spectacle to quiet self reckoning.

One recurring motif is the fragmentation of self. Mirrors refuse reflection. Multiple versions of the same person tremble before an approaching presence. An army of stick figures march towards a blank page to become language. The question of identity pulses throughout, growing more urgent as the collection progresses. Who am I when stripped of illusion? Who am I when faced with my own reflection, or with the absence of it?

Yet I Dreamed… is not simply a catalogue of nightmares. It is equally concerned with intimacy, faith, sexuality and the complicated inheritance of memory. Lovers return in sleep to say what daylight withholds. A cathedral becomes both prison and liberation. The speaker wrestles with shame and emerges carrying the colours of pride. The work confronts internalised judgement with startling candour, refusing to apologise for existence any longer.

The latter section of the collection turns towards darker terrain. Stations, tracks and bottles become symbols of finality. The repetition of the question “Why aren’t you dead yet?” echoes like a tolling bell, exposing the brutal persistence of intrusive thought. These poems are raw and direct, yet never gratuitous. Instead, they illuminate the isolating logic of despair while simultaneously revealing the fragile threads that keep a person tethered to life: memory, love, the possibility of being understood.

Interwoven with the anguish are moments of strange beauty and resistance. Stone heads encircle but cannot contain. A small boy’s imagination, though dimmed by adulthood, still flickers. A hand held in sleep feels like a phantom limb of love. Even in the most desolate passages, there remains a pulse, a quiet insistence that something within the speaker continues to endure.

Stylistically, the collection balances lyrical intensity with stark repetition. Images recur and mutate, creating a dream logic that feels both disorientating and deliberate. The language shifts from the visceral to the devotional, from the surreal to the confessional, drawing readers into a space where the boundary between internal and external reality dissolves.

At its heart, I Dreamed… is a book about survival within the mind’s most hostile landscapes. It does not offer easy comfort or tidy resolution. Instead, it offers honesty. It gives shape to thoughts often left unspoken and renders visible the silent battles that take place in darkness.

This 2026 release promises to be a bold and affecting contribution to contemporary poetry. Readers prepared to step into its shadows may find not only disturbance, but recognition.