Writing

My Life Is A Film I Haven't Yet Watched (2025)
creative non-fiction, Buttonhook Press
​
Miner Toothache / The Snowfields of Belfast / The Great Calorie Saving Devices of the Present / A Million Strong Dead Army / Photo Pass / Bus Crash Plan / Letter to a Fellow Poet / A Small-Limbed Tragedy / Electronic Haunting / Long After Avian Flu / Greetings From My Hands / Place Your Line in the Gene Pool / Boy on Bus / No Retrieval / Lonesome in the Summer Crowd / Waiting for the Lazy Bus / Early Closing / Ice Cream Guilt / Not Writing a Novel / Going for a Walk / Blame the Weather Men and Weather Women​

Read online for free
Microcosms (2025)
poetry

​Purchase Amazon | Gumroad

A collection of 500(!) senryū: a three-line unrhymed Japanese poetic form, structurally similar to haiku, but treating human nature, usually in a satiric or ironic vein. Proceeds go to UNICEF's Gaza Appeal
with the lakes (2023)
poetry, above/ground press

​Purchase signed copy from author
Purchase from above/ground press

Twenty-five poems loosely connected by the theme of water.

Water Tells / Water Tells Nothing / Still Life: Water Bottle / Chalchiuhtlicue / Shipwrecked / Submarine / Permis de Séjour / Mutiny / At Sea / Hickson's Yard / Winter To Water / Enduring a Morning / A Scribble of Asterisms / Everyday Magic / Somewhere, A Farm / Dancing / Madness / Fire Music / What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather / Of Nature / It's Dawn, It's Finally Dawn / Beachcombing / Conjuring Up / Perpetual / ​The Important Thing

Read article on with the lakes over on periodicities
What We Look Like In The Future (2023)
poetry, Red Wolf Editions
​
When God said ‘go forth and multiply’, it was an instruction to begin humanity. Some continue to follow this direction, some now see that mandate as fulfilled. Those who go against the tide of moral persuasion have faced our human existential crisis with a firm, unshakeable belief.

Colin Dardis’s collection takes a certain moral stance that concerns the decision of a couple to not have children, despite societal expectations and familial pressure to start a family. It is a modern love poem, a bold declaration that they are happy and content without children along their journey.

Read online for free
Apocrypha: Collected Early Poems (2022)
poetry, Cyberwit

​Purchase: Amazon | Publisher | Waterstones

From reflections on mental health, to unabashed love poems, to modern mal du siècle, Apocrypha collects poems previously published between 2006-2014. Culled from a wide array of journals, websites and exhibitions throughout Ireland, the UK and the USA, this collection tracks the development of a "quirky, singular voice which sets the writer apart from the standing army of Irish poets" (Poetry Ireland Review). Dardis's poetry cut to the chase, finding moods and sentiments at the core of our existence that we don't always want to admit to, yet must possess in order to survive.

To Speak of Donegal / Visions of Atlantic / Deepest Breath / A Persistent Wind / Belfast Drinks Up and Goes Home / Let’s Wrestle / Superhero / Songbird /Another Nail in the Old Wooden Coffin / As Seen On TV / On Mistakes In Drawings /  Please Return This Poem / Black Lines Across the Countryside / A Schoolbag Full Of Rocks / Perhaps / Candlestick / Watermelon / A Steady Progression / Kissing an Eel / A Perfect Circle / There is nothing / For All the Silent Nights / Tested / Seaweed and Moss / A Civic Reflux / Homeless / Bring It Down Gently / The Stare From Across The Room / Dualism / Flagging / Night of No Choices / Trashlined / The Horses Are Eating Each Other / I Wanna Be A Grown Up / Into The Great Unknown / The Drawbridge Is Up / After You Go / The Jackpot Rush / Chasing / Rallentando / Xaviere /Poem For October
Thoughts on an Unanswered Question / Instant Thought / Press / Into Each Life Some Sun Must Shine / Swimming Around the Inkwell / Abandoned Teabag / Conditions for Prayer / Drought / Hellos and Haloes / Graveside / Hold / Strangled / Outran/ Affective 
All This Light In Which To See The Dead (2022)
non-fiction, Rancid Idols Productions

Written at the height of the worldwide pandemic, All This Light In Which To See The Dead is part journal, part memoir, part essay collection. As much a diary of thoughts and reflections as day-to-day events, the collection sees the author trying to make sense of ‘the new normal’, experiencing the isolation of lockdown through the prism of depression and Asperger’s.

Faced with so many dying from coronavirus, and the fear of death everywhere, the author is forced to confront this own relationship with death, as well as the passing of his father four years previous. Mixed in with reaction to the developing news and daily death counts, Dardis reflects on childhood reminiscences, family, mortality and the apparent joys of middle age.​

Purchase on Amazon
Endless Flower (2021)
poetry, Rancid Idols Productions

A collection of 300 haiku, senryū and other forms of micropoetry. Contains The Art Of Conduction, a sequence of 100 senryū exploring the power of music and the orchestra.

Purchase on Gumroad
​
The Dogs of Humanity (2019)
poetry, Fly On The Wall Press

​"These poems are thematically linked by imagery, or direct allusion to, dogs and others animals. The first part, 'Dogs', uses canine imagery to explore themes of depression and weariness, how societal expectations can leave a person feeling (a runt, a mongrel, etc.). Issues of savagery and lack of humanity are explored, with animals also used as a motif to retreat into a pastoral idea, an escapism from mental health issues, finding an affinity with a nature that we must also sometimes contest."

The collection champions the downtrodden, the bullied, the scorned, the misunderstood, while also pointing a finger to those who mistreat others. These are poems of hurt, of empathy and resilience, but most of all, of the want for a kinder world.

Purchase print 
the x of y (2018)
poetry, Eyewear Publishing

Reality and escapism, protection and peeling away, prayer and sacrilege, resistance and surrender; navigating an often complex and uneven playing field, Colin Dardis strives to find balance from a life constantly fluctuating between profit and loss. The poems on offer here explore questions of existence and identity, asking who we really are, and how we can possibly be.

"In the x of y we encounter a quirky, singular voice which sets the writer apart from the standing army of Irish poets ... there are poems of longing and loneliness here, engaged with the isolation the modern condition can bring about, but Dardis approaches these daily anxieties with a philosophical attitude shot through with wry humour." - Poetry Ireland Review
Post-Truth Blues (2017)
poetry, locofo chaps

A political chapbook of anti-Trump poems, part of a series of 100 such chapbooks from Moira Journal

We Don’t Have Victories Anymore / Psalm / 20th January, 2017 / The New Wall / Tap Dispenser/ Limerick Rejected by Time Magazine / Skittles / Mutiny / Fire and Water / Anarchic Emoting / The Orange Wheelbarrow/ Write
​
Read online for free
Dusk Chorus (2012)
poetry

Forty poems linked by the common themes of dusk, dawn, sleep and insomnia.

(purchase via Gumroad)

Oil Painting / Shimmer / Punch this Season / The Light has Come to Stay / Take the Sun / City Breathing / Silence / Lost to the Night / Capturing my Dreams / Sleep Becomes Her / Bedtime for Modern Days / Cosmic Curtain / Insomnia Shorts / Sleep in Sanctuary / Furrows / The Night Birds / Tightly / Sunshine Bed / Home for Stars / Asleep, as a Corpse may Dream / Awake to This / In Bed, with Dreams Unrealised / A Public Alarm / Turning / Euphoria / I’ll Rather Wait / Driving On / An Agreeable Orbit / A Shift of Seasons / The Clock has made a Mistake / Island / Sprig of Spring / Hang the Sun / Rising / Kids in Shop Fronts / Sunrise at Bridge / Teasing the Sleeper / Release the Sun / Awakenings / Affective​
Dōji: A Blunder (2013)
poetry, Lapwing Publications (out of print)

Foetus Breath / Dōji’s Universe / Dōji’s Puppet / A Movement of Humanity / The Texts of Dōji / A Community of Dōjis /  Dōji’s Guide to Parenting / Dōji’s Views on Education / Dōji’s War / A Dōji Fate / Dōji Studies His Reflection / Dōji Surveys the Land / The Day When Dōji is Crowned King / An Ancient Spell / An Ancient Curse / Dōji’s Anatomy / A Consideration of the Species / Dōji’s Language / Dōji Addresses his Puppet / Ventriloquism / Mealtime / Cloak and Clock / Dōji’s Fall / Wallowing Dōji / Cruising Sleep / Magpie Dōji / Dōji’s Fist (Chiromancy) / A Meeting / Dōji Heart / A Human Thing​
 
Other Works

Poetry​
  • left of soul (2010) privately published, out of print

Plays
  • How The Story Ends (published in The Belfast Review, Issue 3, 2025)

Broadsides and Other Pieces