Playing Solitaire for Money

“Playing Solitaire for Money” is a collection of lyric poems, which are contemporary in form and subject. It’s roughly split into three types of poems. The first third are poems about our globalised experience – seeing us as small parts in “a colossal machine”, bit part players in the complexities of modern society. The poems take our everyday experiences and distil them into somewhat surreal, but always truthful scenarios. The middle poems in the collection are more personal – observations on modern life, or ruminations on cinema or fiction. The last few poems are more playful – stepping out into the hidden landscapes on the edge of the city, or conjuring up scenes of middle-class absurdity. Yet there is nothing mundane in these poems. A cup of coffee in a high street chain is a chance to imagine the “impossible narratives” of the “coffee girl” serving the author; getting lost in a maze becomes a question about poetry’s use of metaphor; and, in the poem from which the title line comes, a person’s internal manias become a real life “monster”, that sits on it’s own, “playing solitaire for money.” These two dozen poems are never slight, and always repay re-reading, almost metaphysical in their warping of our recognisable realities.

Late Love

Have I ever wandered in the flower garden,
Absent from self-obsession,
Or, when drawn to a particular bud
Smelt its brief fragrance and lost myself?
And why, when transient beauty
Fades at speed, do I still glow
With the warm lie of that time?

Is it because I am a special case
Hotbed raised and partial to the sun?
Or would it be truer if I said:
We are all blessed with these hopes
And only weep when the memories turn
Into emblems of our casual regret.
On standing before the wind, a stem will break.

And when the past days merge into future nights
And chance uploads its lucky card—
When driven snow piles up against the solid door
And a pale flame marks our sorrow …
The long tracks in the snow we left behind
Are traceable beyond the edge of the wood.
A kiss, on lips still warm, redeems us still.

OUT NOW from SALT PUBLISHING as part of their Salt Modern Voices series.
Read more here.

Buy from The Book Depository

Buy from Amazon

Buy from Waterstones

Buy from the Poetry Book Society.

My Life According to the Albums of David Bowie 1968-1983(A story for National Short Story Day)

Its the shortest day, which means its National Short Story Day, and here’s one I wrote a few years ago, which maps the characters life against the albums of David Bowie, I hope you enjoy.

1. The World of David Bowie (Collected early recordings) (1968)

My name is David Jones. I read the Daily Express because my father has had it delivered since before the beginning of time and reading between the lines of all the stuff that he reads, I can tell there’s a revolution going on. My father mutters about Hippies the way he used to about Socialists. I can see the pictures and if I balance my portable radio at a certain angle I can catch Radio Luxembourg which is still better than Radio One, though I like John Peel’s Perfumed Garden, and hear the songs that make here, where I live, seem another planet. I have to get out. My mother makes us all eat dinner at the same time every night. There is nowhere to go. My father wants to set me up with an apprenticeship. He thinks I might make a passable draughtsman if I “get a proper haircut” and stop drawing from “that dangerous imagination of yours.” Something makes me want to go and study an art foundation course in Birmingham but I might as well ask to be put forward for the next Apollo mission. My father and I have one bridge between us: for an hour a week we are sat down watching “Civilisation” together. Neither of us say a word, but Kenneth Clarke is as close as we have to a mutual friend. But this isn’t civilisation; this is the suburbs.

2. Space Oddity (1969)

There’s a man on the moon and I’m watching it happen over egg and chips. My egg is the sun, the chips are the stars, a piece of white bread is the Apollo mission pod and this dollop of ketchup means Blast! something has gone terribly wrong and Buzz and Neil and the rest are all turned technicolor. On the television though everything is going to plan. “They’re probably filming it on a movie set in Hollywood,” my father grumpily suggests. I keep schtum. Until it’s in the Daily Express he won’t believe a word of it, certainly not something he’s seen on the Gogglebox. My mother is saying “stop playing with your food,” and “tug your tie in to your shirt if you want to keep it out of the egg.” She likes it now I’m at work. There’s a whole new list of rules and regulations that she can insist that I follow. The kitchen door doesn’t do much to hold out the smell and the sweat and the steam of the cooking; and I can almost taste the sickly smell of boiled over milk. My mother is looking at my hands. “What?” I say. “You can go wash them,” she says, “I’m not having you at the table looking like that.” I expect to see them covered in blood, but no, its the inky imprint of a day lurched over the draughtboard. Each step up the stairs to the bathroom makes Neil Armstrong’s small step seem small and insignificant. I wonder. Is this it? Is. This. It.

Nottingham Poetry Reading

Nottingham Poetry Reading

Over and Back

“Over and Back” is one of the older poems in “Playing Solitaire for Money”, written in 2005. I sometimes baulk at the idea of writing nature poetry. I have always lived in cities or on the edge of urban landscapes; even if my childhood was spent in that strange “edgeland” (to use Micheal Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s term) of the Midlands “Green Belt.” My landscape was always a man-made one, however full of wild flowers and stretches of water it might be.

Salt Modern Voices @ The Compass Islington

I’m reading with Claire Trevien, Lee Smith and JT Welsch at the Compass, nr. Angel, Islington, London on Monday 14th November. It’s free and should be a great evening – all are welcome – but let us know you’re coming via the Facebook event.

Audio: Playing Solitaire for Money

“Playing Solitaire for Money” was launched at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester in January 2011, alongside JT Welsch’s “Orchids”. Will Carr, from the Foundation introduced us, and kindly recorded the performance. It lasts just under 20 minutes and is available to listen to or as a podcast download (To Download: click on Info, then on the collection name, and this will take you to the Soundcloud site, and the down arrow allows you to download and save the file.)

1. Anthony Burgess (unpublished)
2. My Monster
3. Frontier
4. The Death of the Grand Gesture
5. Late Love
6. The Maze
7. The Hidden Species of the Foja Mountains (unpublished)
8. In the Harlequin (unpublished)

Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage seems forever young, but he’s now 48, a testament to how long he’s been in the public eye as one of our favourite poets. I first encountered him in the early 90s. I’d given up on contemporary British poetry after a thin diet that was the Morrison/Motion Penguin anthology, thinking it wasn’t for me. Somehow I then came across Armitage, and snapped up the first 2 books, “Kid” and “Zoom”, like an adolescent rock band these early works still resonate with me. Formal, funny, contemporary, irreverent, but also truthful and deeply felt, his poetry struck a genuine chord with people who, in the cliche, don’t usually read poetry. Yet I’ve never felt of Armitage as a gateway drug to contemporary verse, rather that he’s a one-off, a poet to his fingertips. Even more recently, seeing him read from “Seeing Stars” (a very different collection), I’ve been impressed by the compression in his work, every line does a job, and he somehow manages to fit more into a poem than most of his contemporaries. He’s moved into longer works in recent years, and from “Dead Sea Poems” onwards there’s always been a yearning away from the quotidian towards something more spiritual. His background as a probation worker, his love of music, and his continuing identification with his Yorkshire background have survived his adoption by Radio 4 and others. Lyrically, he may remain accessible, but his mixed-media projects, such as his 9/11 film, “Out of the Blue” or his young offenders’ sung opera “Feltham Sings” are rare examples of hybrid forms being more than the sum of his parts. He’s as close to a poet of my generation that there is, and remains an important touchstone; an older literary brother, even if not specifically an influence.

Simon Armitage on Wikipedia

Simon Armitage’s Website

Video: A Colossal Machine

I haven’t read this poem from Playing Solitaire for Money that often, so its nice that it was recorded when I opened my short set at the 2011 Manchester Book Market in St. Ann’s Square. It’s one of several poems towards the start of the book that uses technology imagery to explore the contemporary condition. Perhaps the “colossal machine” is Google or the Wayback Engine? Or, as in Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” a computer yet to be built.

A Colossal Machine

Rewinding our histories can’t play the tape,
For that requires a colossal machine,
That has long gone out of production,
Or has yet to be made. In part, it’s myth,
Yet we subscribe to it, our site feed
Syndicating the latest news, as if a thing
Can be dripfed to us through words.

The manual alone would be extensible,
Using a language shared by half the world’s tribes,
Competing to contribute to a shared goal.
The ultimate prize for the next life;
Our essence read, stored, accidentally erased,
Whilst the tests go on in private.
In my room I murmur a prayer.

Creative Non-Fiction for Writers Workshop

I am giving a workshop as part of the Calderdale Writers Workshop New Writing day in Brighouse Library on Saturday 10th September.

You can choose 2 workshops during the day – and mine is described below. As an example of my own creative non-fiction, you can read these 2 published pieces in this free download from Flax Books.

Adrian Slatcher – Creative Non-fiction for Writers

Non-fiction is not just for journalists or academics – it has a long history of being used creatively, and increasingly writers are using the tools of fiction to write non-fiction. This workshop will look at what is creative non-fiction; provide examples of how writers have and are using fictional techniques in non-fiction and discuss the rise of blogs and the blogger.

In this workshop you will gain experience of writing creatively and be given some tools and techniques on how to do so.

The Maze

The Maze was written in summer 2009 in Norwich in the second of 3 visits to the “Worlds” festival of writers organised by Writers’ Centre Norwich. With Worlds 2011 starting this week, I thought it would be good to put it online. Its a great week, and anyone who can get to Norwich is recommended to do so! Each year the writers go on a visit to a local literary spot, and that year we went to Somerleyton Hall, which some readers will know from Sebald’s “Rings of Saturn”. The American poet/anthologist Cole Swensen had just joined the group and I dedicated the poem to her. This photograph by Martin Figura at Writers’ Centre Norwich captures the moment of the poem. The poem appears in my pamphlet “Playing Solitaire for Money.”

Adrian Slatcher, Cole Swensen and Xu Xi

Manchester Independent Book Market Reading

I’ll be reading at the Manchester Independent Book Market in St. Ann’s Square, from “Playing Solitaire for Money”, along with other poets, performance and otherwise, and fiction writers on Saturday 18th June 2011. It’s always a good day, even if it occasionally (always!) rains…. I’m on at 1.20pm in the afternoon.