A friend was in touch with me yesterday, catching up, and observed that he keeps a copy of my memoir in the glove compartment of his car. Often transporting others to and fro for quick visits, he explained that in sitting and waiting for their return, he’ll dip in and out as the book is so close to hand. What a wonderful (and thoughtful) idea! And the brisk vignettes are perfect for this. Derrida would seem to agree…

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Thanks and a Happy Christmas to IT and Rupert; thanks also to Atlanta Wiggs for the illustration!

Read the poems here.

‘Static Gleanings’ by Tom Cowin – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘Buried Gods Metal Prophets’ by Maria Stadnicka – Guillemot Press ~ Here

‘Coronavirus Genome (Monolith)’ by Tom Phillips – published jointly by Plaugolt Satzwechsler and Timglast Editions ~ Here

‘The Hours’ by Gillian Clarke – Broken Sleep Books ~ Here

‘I Remember’ by Ian Seed – The Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘A crocodile, out of nowhere’ by James Roome – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘Santa Lucia’ by Charlie Baylis – Invisible Hand Press ~ Here

‘Eat Here, Get Gas & Worms’ by Steve Spence – Red Ceilings Press ~ Here

‘From Fibs to Fractals. Exploring mathematical forms in poetry’ by Marian Christie – Beir Bua Press ~ Here

‘rhubarb’ by Tom Jenks – Beir Bua Press ~ Here

‘A Democracy of Poisons’ by Tim Allen – Shearsman Press ~ Here

…and Poetry Tweeted Appreciations/Recommendations (click on individual images to enlarge)

Reading that Sunday’s newspaper supplement
Those We Lost, he was warmed by how many

of those recollected had touched his life too:
memories shaped by their presence and what

was left behind, hearing and seeing afterwards
to feel life all over again. He contacted a few

closest friends and asked if they would want a
forfeit of his life for any such as those others.

It couldn’t be a free-for-all – and apart from not
eschewing his own survival completely, he wanted

a category to be made up with the like-minded,
some deep empathy in any permanent exchange,

so he selected Musicians / Writers / Actors / Artists
(‘creatives’ as a shared love), and though never

thinking he’d made similar impressions, hoped
this would be a prompt and urge for remembering him.

From however many of these, one would be chosen
to return and take his place, and it’d be his decision

entirely – the least he would ask for in the offering.
Setting a deadline up to the end of the week

(as plenty of time for their deliberations) he did
receive one response early the next morning.

(image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand)

Go here for more

I think this is an extraordinary collection – a high-octane collage of ideas, soundbites, axioms, quotations, misquotes, lyricism, outbursts, narrative dysfunction and sudden apocalypse, comedy, bathos (comic and tragic) – which is to name, as they say, just a few. It is reflecting on a finite time of experience across an infinite refraction of it.

This rich range is contained but obviously not constrained by the framing as 100 prose poems of 28 lines across four stanzas each and I don’t think there is any particular rationale to the imposition of a form and finite number other than pragmatism. There could be, and one could make a case/argument, but why?

A wonderful tension/outcome is, however, how this pragmatism is exploded by the riff of random (or apparently so) thinking that occurs within its shaping. This is obvious in the consistent trajectories of thought and language, and within individual lines/phrases like ‘the shape of a forest is not the meaning of trees’.

I’ve pulled the above from 51. Work, so half way through the 100 poems, and this is where I will stop. I do so because saying more – from me anyway, now – would be the poison to perhaps corrupt what Tim Allen accomplishes in each and every poem (‘making us dizzy while coolly smiling’): the poison of over-analysis.

This poem speaks for itself so I simply celebrate its funeral cameo that Allen attends as ‘an unfinished work of temptation’ which I embrace as I haven’t finished reading – and I don’t mean from cover to cover – and I certainly don’t expect to ever reach an end.