If poetry is metaphor, which of course it often is, then I need to select an apt one to characterise/tag this collection of Colin Herd’s, so I’m going for Pinball Poetry which I trust is suggestively sprightly enough to counter any hint of trivialising.

Because I am not. For me, these poems are – here it comes – shot from their first line to propel their way here, there and everywhere, bouncing from one idea and language encapsulation to the next, often as complete tangents and often as links that are nonetheless surprising: the former exemplified in the scatterings of Poem on a bath mat / Poem on a shower curtain with its richly relentless line after line after line of

‘Hello Yes As Soon As Possible
obsessed with pumpkins and polka dots
all the sweat in and around and over’,

the latter exemplified in a – relatively – extrapolated take on

‘jouissance or puissance?’

from I doubt you want me which also contains two little but likeable jokes on the names Bill and Will.

Yet it could be in the way they are read. Poems like Book Lungs and Here I wriggle with a sunken butt are clear narratives – well, clearish in their linear momentums. My favourite sister’s uncle tells a delightful story.

What is a description anyway in a world that at all levels defies describing? What is truth? It would seem it is all a ‘chewed shape’ and Herd continues to see it appearing and disappearing and reappearing ‘more chewed than you remember’ and so the poetic grasp is a ping from one to the next, sprightly and chewable over and over and over for the reader.

Another bright nifty collection from The Red Ceilings Press, you can purchase here.

I am very pleased to have another ‘Trump’ poem published here, and again at the feisty forum of the International Times.

I found yesterday in a reconnaissance through my PC files that I have a body of poetry written in response to The Donald, and I have collected these under the ironic title The Inspiration of Trump. As with Genius, most are found in his own distorted words, themselves a reflection of his – being ironic again – thinking.

I wrote here about the P.E.N. Anthology of Poetry from 1973 and that night I watched the amazing, unsettling programme Nixon on Nixon, In His Own Words on TV – recounted largely about that same year but also into 1974, the words of Nixon himself on the Watergate affair truly frightening in reflecting the same denial and arrogance of Trump today [it is more expansive and complex than this…]. Nixon of course had more guile and inherent intelligence compared with Trump, but it is both astonishing and deeply disturbing that the abuse of power would seem to be as commonplace today as it was then.

What I did wonder was how much poetry was written explicitly about Nixon and Watergate at that time compared with the amount about Trump today. Interestingly, there was only one direct political poem in the ’73 P.E.N. anthology, and that was Michael Hamburger’s poem Newspaper Story.

I did find today this reference to The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon, a volume compiled by Jack S. Margolis and published in 1974. These too are found poems taken from the Watergate tapes, so, and not surprising, the methodology is the same. The book is no longer easily available, but three original copies are for sale on Amazon marketplace starting at £166 [or $65 from .com]. Here’s a poem from the book,

IN THE END

In the end
We are going
To be bled
To death.
And in the end,
It is all going
To come out anyway.
Then you get the worst
Of both worlds.