My pamphlet Smithereens, which will be published by 4Word at the beginning of April now has a cover and is available to pre-order on the books page of this site. I will be launching the pamphlet along with Ruth Aylett's Pretty in Pink via Zoom on Friday 19 March at 7PM. If you'd like to attend the launch, you can book a ticket here and you can request an open mic reading slot by Emailing Ruth. If you're interested but can't make that, there will be a further launch event in April, date to be announced.
Smithereens is the story a friendship between me and 'A' that lasted for more than forty years. It began at school, before we were teenagers and ended with the untimely death of ‘A’ in 2017. Here's one of the poems from the pamphlet, using the 'duplex' form introduced by American poet Jericho Brown: Duplex for A After Jericho Brown Thirst isn’t thirst if it can be quenched. You put five-thousand miles between us. When you put five-thousand miles between us my stories of you grew truer than fact. The world you chose wove truth out of facts. You loved ideas more than the body. To flesh her idea, she used your body. It took on a life beyond her, beyond you. You never thought that life was beyond you, to reach for it now, you needed help. You had to reach for whatever helped. Oblivion, knowledge – sides of a coin. Sides of a coin – knowledge, oblivion. Your thirst was real. It couldn’t be quenched. Here is what people have said about Smithereens: “Written with the wisdom of hindsight and shot through with real tenderness and love, these poems tell the story of a friendship between two men which stretches across a lifetime and around the world. The pamphlet’s narrative arc is as compelling as a novel, and each individual poem is that rare thing – a true moment of musicality and lyricism.” Kim Moore “Smithereens explores the loss of a long male friendship, its elegies fretting restlessly backwards and forwards through time and the stages of grief. These are poems bursting with the talk that “we hadn’t needed to say / for forty-odd years” – intimate, urgent and affecting, private gifts to the dead which speak powerfully to the living. This is a moving, unusual and beautiful collection of poems.” Antony Dunn “Farren’s poems are snap shots, an album of words which capture the moments of a lifelong friendship and the slow decline, the long-loss of a friend, the distance of an ocean away. Farren has a deft touch; the poems are sensitive, but not sentimental, with a solid skeleton of anger but more importantly, love.” Wendy Pratt
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Prior to the publication of my pamphlet Smithereens, which drops (as I believe the poetry kids say nowadays) at the beginning of April from 4Word Press, I thought it was about time my 'Books' page was overhauled. I'll be adding Smithereens shortly for pre-orders. In the meantime, this is what Antony Dunn has to say about the pamphlet: “Smithereens explores the loss of a long male friendship, its elegies fretting restlessly backwards and forwards through time and the stages of grief. These are poems bursting with the talk that “we hadn’t needed to say / for forty-odd years” – intimate, urgent and affecting, private gifts to the dead which speak powerfully to the living. This is a moving, unusual and beautiful collection of poems.” Until the pamphlet is available, I wanted to talk about some of the books that I have published as Ings Poetry. Although I am part of the team at Yaffle Press, I have been publishing as Ings for several years, mainly producing anthologies for groups with which I am involved. The most recent of these is the anthology On the Other Side, published on behalf of the Ilkley-based group, Wharfedale Poets, of which I am a member. Frustrated by our inability to meet because of COVID-19, we nevertheless did not want to compile yet another pandemic anthology. Instead, we began to wonder what we might find on the other side.
Taking inspiration from this urge to be 'on the other side', we look at the question of sides from many different angles. How do we relate to those on the other side of a political divide? How can we know the person on the other side of the window? How have we been changed when we reach the other side of a journey? What - if anything - awaits us on the other side of death? One of my contributions is given below: Centaur After Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s ‘Swineherd’ When all this is over, said the centaur, they’ll expect me to be one thing or another. They’ll corral me into their taxonomies, as malformed human or – to them – an enhanced horse. They’ll make me choose between the headlong gallop down the slopes of Taygetus for the hell of the wind in my face and the scent of crushed thyme beneath my hooves – or lyre, lust for nymphs and drinking dish, and in either case, they’ll judge me by standards that have nothing to do with the foster-child of Apollo, with the teacher of Achilles: they’ll foist their human morality on my mythic appetites or track me with GPS on Google Earth, up Olympus, as I search, forlornly, for the gods. Please take a look at On the Other Side and the other books available. I would be delighted if you were interested in a copy. Please use the links on the Books page to let me know, or get in contact with me. |
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