Next

<p><strong><em>Poetry by the screenwriter of 'Hideous Kinky' starring Kate Winslet and script editor of Jane Campion's 'The Piano'.</em></strong></p><p></p><p>This poetry volume is the yield of almost nine years of notebooks observations and locations mostly Athens and Berlin but a smattering of London Marrakech Cameroon and West Bengal. I am a worker in film and stage: it is a wandering life.</p><p></p><p>The act of observation may be at the heart of all this of observed events on a daily human scale but also of recorded personal feelings and reactions a springboard to some more generalised reality to the mythos of the particular moment.</p><p></p><p>A lost button on a Berlin cafe pavement a shabby girl in golden sandals a civic rubbish bin the lures of poverty the nags of memory; each is commonplace enough but a window too onto the sightlines and vanishing points of human possibility.</p><p></p><p>Poetry functions at the edge of grammar and hence the edge of meaning with all its pitfalls and opportunities. Yet to quote an unexpected and surprising source Anais Nin: 'In dreams we dream alone. Only reality is shared.' Not only author but player in that concomitant. The imaginary speaker the imagined self imagined listener - all of that of course. And yet there is the broader stage of common struggle and imagination whose best practitioner may yet remain the popular song. It wakes you a half-discovered melody half-invented a fragment at your bedside. Not the stuff of dreams. A visitor for real. The stuff of song whose voice is simple in its simple imperative simple in its life-affirmingness. Singer. Sing.</p><p></p><p><em>For fans of Catullus Tu Fu Emily Dickinson Anna Akhmatova Berthold Brecht Jacques Prevert and Robert Graves.</em></p>