Two readings in September

I'm pleased to report that I've got a number of dates lined up over the coming months to give readings from The Knives of Villalejo. The first two of these will be in late September: I'll be a guest poet at Shindig in Leicester on the 25th, followed by a similar slot at CB Writers in Cambridge on the following day, the 26th. Needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to hitting the road with my first full collection!

Two poetry bloggers on their fathers

Two of my favourite poetry bloggers have written exquisitely about their fathers in the last couple of months. Both tell us something of their respective family histories, complemented by one of their own poems. The stories and contexts might be very different, but each blogger offers their readers a moving poetic achievement. You can read Martyn Crucefix's post here and Liz Lefroy's piece here.

The price of poetry

- Two pints of bitter and two packets of crisps down The Bell
- a solitary trip to the cinema on Saturday
- off-peak ten-pin bowling for two
- a round of mini-golf for two down the park
- half a ticket to watch Aldershot Town vs Torquay United
- half a bad seat for a show at Chichester Festival Theatre

All these cost me as much (or as little) as a full collection...

A sense of otherness, Gram Joel Davies' Bolt Down This Earth

A well produced and written first collection from an emerging publisher always represents an enticing prospect, and Gram Joel Davies’ Bolt Down This Earth (V. Press, 2017) is no exception.

Davies’ poetry relishes a sense of otherness which unsettles at first. At certain moments, conjunctions, prepositions or articles are suppressed, contractions avoided, nouns turned into verbs, everything often wrapped in the aural effect of repeated vowels. This means that the reader initially has to feel a way through these poems as if sight were blurred. However, as we get to grips with Davies’ idiosyncratic use of language, the consequence is that a perspective is eventually revealed afresh, brighter and more vivid than we could have expected.

One such example occurs in the closing lines of “The Plan”:

“…while you and I, at four a.m.,

thunder with the bedstead on the wall,

a bolt will plunge the flower bed,

the headland bitten like a scone,

and we’ll crescendo to the ocean floor –

ride the rocksled through a whooping storm.”

This extract provides two instances of nouns being converted into verbs – “thunder” and “crescendo”, while the reader would also conventionally expect a preposition after the verb “plunge”. Moreover, there’s an edgy, constant, almost enervating repetition of one vowel sound, “…bedstead…bed…headland…crescendo…”, all topped off by the inventive “rocksled” and complemented by a risky simile “like a scone” that pulls off its effect by evoking the crumbling texture and chalky appearance of the headland in question.

It does take a while for the reader to come to terms with Gram Joel Davies’ poetry, as if having to get used to a new dialect of an already-learnt language. Nevertheless, Bolt Down This Earth shows that the effort is worthwhile. Davies’ sonorous, surprising and jolting narratives are coherent, cohesive and highly unusual. They’ll challenge your expectations.