Twice winner of the Shaunt Basmajian Chapbook Award and UK Poet of the Year in the Purple Patch Small Press Awards 2009, this latest poetry collection will not disappoint her many fans.

'You Can Almost Hear Their Voices' - the title poem - is a remembrance of times past and many poems in the collection are the same:
 
Places we no longer inhabit and people no longer with us. Voices of the departed. Clear reflections on what was, what might-have-been and an incisive awareness of what is.

As KV put it: Last call for the innocent
  who still insists
  on happily-ever-after.

K.V. Skene has a unique voice, detached and wry. Her poems are always worth reading. Merryn Williams. Editor - The Interpreter’s House

Whatever the subject, whatever the form, K V Skene has the knack of always startling one into awareness. Sam Smith. Editor - The Journal

A prolonged look at her poetry reveals that those intriguing secret initials stand for Konsistancy and Variety. Geoff Stevens. Editor - Purple Patch

KV Skene has that ability to put across complex meanings in terms that are genuinely crafted and refined that invite the reader to understand without strain. Therefore, her work gives what many poets fail to achieve - genuine reading pleasure.  
Martin Holroyd. Editor - Poetry Monthly International

PIANISSIMO

In the small hours
when no one else is listening

you feel the shape of your hands
as your fingers open

empty as the house
when your mother is not home

  is nowhere
she can be touched or spoken to

and you in your second-best dress
cherry-red sandals

alone at the Bechstein
flames playing over your hands

even as you hold note on note
her song

dying. It is beautiful
and so are you

with your pupils wide open as mirrors
the music inside beckoning.

AND PEACE IS

slap-happy footprints criss-crossing a beach
under a sky as young as a yellow umbrella;
an old woman, cheeks crumpled with laughter,
feeding stale buns and fresh confessions to her pigeons;
a café on a street you fall in love with –
hot and bright and in-your-face
as an underground busker and peace is
a slow soggy jog in the rain, the lamps lit,
the small doors open to the night,
the square slabs of pavement solid underfoot;
a high-five from a giggle of schoolchildren
mudpuddling their way home and peace
is everything you wish for
when blowing out birthday candles and peace is
the understanding that comes between
birdsong and traffic pound; between
one heartbeat, and the next, and the next; between
a still small voice
and so many words of mass destruction and
peace is a beautiful stranger caught at a stoplight;
a fair-weather friend glimpsed across a crowded room;
the silence that shivers between
suicide bombers and retaliatory raids; between
sectarian skirmishes and pre-emptive strikes; between
those who kill and those who wait to be killed,
maimed, imprisoned, enslaved, left
stunned under a skewbald sky
that holds its breath and waits and waits and
a fey face behind a windowpane – there,
then gone.

FLYING WITHOUT YOU

Point of Departure Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Cincinnati &
Northern Kentucky - a long, long way without
love – a word I can’t live with
although I keep trying to. Touch me,
I bend. Kiss me, I open.
Want me,
I am warm air rising…

Gate 13 Even the clock disconnects
as minute by minute 747s
drop out of heaven,
howling,
as I wait (without you) to begin/
to be gone. The older I get
the more certain uncertainty is.

Take-off And the earth turns around
its petrified past. I slip a ring
from my finger and take myself
(separately, deliberately)
into tomorrow – a detour, a début,
a divorce. Flying without you
is being unknown, uncared-for,
in an undiscovered country.

Suspended in Sky Blue. The icecold blue
in which time disintegrates
and thoughts crystal upon conception.
The absolute bluenothingness that is tundra,
permafrost, glaciers smothered in wind,
slippery with snow-melt. The blueprint of a soul/
of a sea
in which wave after wave lifts, turns back
without looking.

Orbital Observation Underneath our wings
a suicide sky. Inside my brain
there is no difference between falling
into everything and falling
into nothing
both leave you without a choice/
a prayer.

Re-entry Without fanfare the earth rises,
the landscape expands
a little too fast: snowtrails, evergreen valleys,
skyhigh rivers slithering to sea
as small walleyed buildings shoulder
a switchblade highway, swell
to cityscape.

Touchdown Flat earth and heavy bodyparts (Without you
I’m filling in the blanks with truths that aren’t.)
and time restarts, slow-rolls the final runway,
as I lug my overweight carry-on,
my overwrought memories
out the designated door.

Grounded Leaving Lester B. Pearson,
streetlights blink a downtown
tattooed in red and gold.
I know what I’m hoping for, holding
my breath for –
arriving (without you) at half-past Happy Hour –
I’ll knock on that blue door on Bathurst Street
if without me
is the lonely place you want to be.

YOU CAN ALMOST HEAR THEIR VOICES

cutting through the tired traffic-hum. All at once
summer children have taken over Dublin,
the streets singing and you’re fumbling for the words.
Unburdened and beautiful in their skins, as you once were –
no history, no guilt, no regrets, no bloodshot flush of roses,
heavy-scented and blowsy –
just before evening caught you and your excuses
out on the terrace, out in the jangling air
you would share with everyone. Your hands, steady as always,
pour sweet wine into the best long-stemmed glasses,
place bowls of strawberries and ice cream
on the white table,
prop the French doors wide, inviting
forgotten friends, the ghosts of innumerable June brides
out into the garden, still damp with summer rain
and madly overgrown.

AND ONCE AGAIN

to lie through that last
December night, slow-shift
through endless cigarettes
and much too much red wine – drunk
and at home with disorderly,
(just another soft touch)
to whisper “yes,
yes again…”
backpage
a full calendar of resolutions – any
body at hand for auld lang syne
and once again
a year burns down
to its cold
and absolute
end.