My sixth collection of poetry – “The Homelessness of a Child” – is published today, 1st April. Perhaps long overdue, a fair proportion is an exploration of the hardships and repercussions of my difficult childhood. As the intro says: “By the time Ian Gouge went to university he had already lived in seventeen different places… Read More Published today! “The Homelessness of a Child”
Imagine the scene. The knock at the door. The delivery man. In his hands, an A4-sized box, the kind that contains those four-pack reams of paper you get for your inkjet printer. He smiles and hands you the box. “I’ll go and get the other eight”… Once you have closed the front door, you turn… Read More Not The National Poetry Competition
My sixth collection of poetry – “The Homelessness of a Child” – will be published on 10th April. Perhaps long overdue, a fair proportion is an exploration of the hardships and repercussions of my difficult childhood. As the intro says: “By the time Ian Gouge went to university he had already lived in seventeen different… Read More Forthcoming book – April publication
I’m thinking of taking a sabbatical from poetry. Giving it up for a while. A bit of ‘detox’. Why? Multiple reasons really. The easy one is to say that “I want to focus on my prose”. Very little collateral damage in that one I suspect. And it also has the benefit of being true! I… Read More Time for a Poetry ‘sabbatical’?
In one of Lawrence Durrell’s poems there is a wonderful line: Give us the language of diamonds The Death of General Uncebunke, Fourteen Carols (V) That simple phrase – “the language of diamonds” – has always seemed to me complex, profound, powerful, beautiful. The subtlety of it comes in the unpacking of it of course,… Read More ‘The Language of Diamonds’
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But how many of us like to think of ourselves as ‘Writers’ (note the capital ‘w’!) when – to be frank – we don’t really put the hours in. Think about it. How could you be a surgeon without learning your craft and then operating on people day-in day-out, or a… Read More You can’t be a Writer without writing…
Every few months or so – usually at propitious or convenient points – I take stock of where I am with my writing. These reviews take the form of notes scribbled into one of many(!) notebooks, and essentially provide a snapshot of where I am with my creative work. When arriving at such moments (as… Read More A glance in the rear-view mirror…
If his “Selected Poems” (Ed. Peter Porter) is anything to go by, Lawrence Durrell’s poetry has not travelled well through time. Whilst they may have been stylistically appropriate for the 30s and 40s, I fear that do not sit well in the twenty-first century. Many seem contrived and clumsy, with (sometimes inconsistent) rhyming schemes shoe-horned… Read More “Selected Poems” – Lawrence Durrell
Why is it that so many of us live our lives – subconsciously or otherwise – as if there is a secret rewind button always available? A button that gifts us the opportunity to revisit past triumphs, to avoid horrible defeats; a button which permits us to take different decisions and make alternate choices. And… Read More The rewind button’s broken…
Andrew Motion’s “Randomly Moving Particles” is, in many ways, a quite remarkable tour de force of free verse; indeed, it is so ‘free’ that I am reminded of the narrative qualities of Robin Robertson’s award-winning “The Long Take”. Nowhere is the power of his work more in evidence than in ‘How Do the Dead Walk’,… Read More “Randomly Moving Particles”
As a writer and Indie Publisher I am always grateful that my distributor and the Nielsen book registration service have direct feeds into major on-line retailers. This facility means that, as soon as a book is published, it usually appears on global websites within 24-48 hours. However, what appears is only as good as the… Read More Why you shouldn’t believe everything an Amazon page says about a book…
John Birtwhistle’s latest collection of poetry, “in the event”, is an intriguing and eclectic mix; a real pic’n’mix of the traditional and modern, the poetic and the prosaic. It is a ‘something for everyone’ kind of book. Which, in a way, is both a strength and a weakness. There are ‘statement’ pieces – the more… Read More “in the event”
A few weeks ago, I attended – virtually, of course! – the Carcanet launch of John Birtwhistle’s latest poetry collection, “in the event”, with John himself reading. I met John just over forty years ago at the University of Southampton where I was studying English and John was ‘writer-in-residence’, or some such. There were writing… Read More A short memory of Jacques Berthoud
As my first real foray into the work of Simon Armitage, our Poet Laureate, I had expected fireworks from “Paper Aeroplane”… Unfortunately I found it more ‘Sparkler’ than giant ‘Roman Candle’. Several things struck me about this volume, a collection culled from twenty-one of Armitage’s other books: There didn’t seem to be any consistent ‘voice’… Read More “Paper Aeroplane”
In her poem ‘Dark Looks’, Riley says “So, take me or leave me … or don’t flick and skim to the foot of the page and then get up to go -” – which is precisely what I did do. After all, most of the time I had pretty much no idea what was going… Read More “Selected Poems” – Denise Riley
OK. Let’s get a couple of things clear up front… This post isn’t about speed-dating Actually I’ve never had any experience of speed-dating, so if you hear anything to the contrary they are just vile rumours So, speed-dating. The ‘topic’ – or at least the title of the topic – comes from a recent post… Read More Speed-dating
There can be few writers more generally inaccessible than e.e.cummings. By breaking so many conventions – both in the language and structure of poetry – perhaps the primary thing cummings’ achieved was to release the traditional shackles and taboos which may have been constraining poetry in the first part of the twentieth century. You could… Read More “e.e.cummings: selected poems 1923-1958”
Forgive me, but to my mind Robert Frost is no great time-traveller, his verse is stylistically too anchored in the past. I find it amazing that some of this vast collection was actually written in the Sixties, especially when you think about what had been going on in poetry (and literature in general) since the… Read More “The Collected Poems: Robert Frost”
Yesterday evening I, along with at least a couple of hundred others, sat in on the Zoom launch of the Autumn 2020 edition of The Poetry Society’s quarterly tome, the Poetry Review. For some time now there has been a consistent refrain among members of the poetry groups to which I belong that an unreasonable… Read More So maybe poetry isn’t about the language any more…
I am currently working my way through two-hundred-and-seven submissions for an anthology of poetry and prose I plan to publish early in 2021. It’s an interesting experience. As a first stage I’ve taken to dividing pieces into three groups: Shortlist – those that are clearly good and likely to make the final cut; Longlist –… Read More Searching for good writing…
