Hello all,
My new book, The Poet’s Cane (so that’s were the website name comes from, absolutely nobody is thinking), is out now from the good folks at Alien Buddha Press. A spotlight featuring the first seven poems can be found by following the above link. The book can be bought here: http://amazon.com/dp/B09CRNTTDC
Thanks for following, guys!
Hello all,
My second poetry collection, The Egg That Ate the Chicken, is out now and available to buy here from Lulu. It will be available worldwide via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in all good book shops in about six to eight weeks.
It’s more wide-ranging and accessible than Culture 99/01, so if you’ve been sitting on the fence, why not give this one a go?
This is what I do. Even if you buy just one of my books, it is worth everything to me. I appreciate the support immensely.
Thank you all,
Colin.
Hello all,
My first chapbook is now published and is available to buy right now here at Lulu.com. It will also be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble in about six to eight weeks time. An e-book version will appear too at some point (once I know what I’m doing).
This is something of a re-release of sorts. I wrote these poems back in 2001, and self-published them in a very short-lived run of about ten off the back of my home printer. I’m very proud of them. They were the first poems that I felt had a true and consistent voice of my own to them and I’m happy to see them in print properly as I’ve always wanted them to be.
It’s a short book, but I’m just getting started and there are larger books to come.
So, if you think this is something you might like, please buy a copy. Any support for what I do is appreciated more than you can know.
Below is a couple of poems from the book so you can get an idea of what it’s like.
Enjoy!
Colin.
Culture 01 – One
has a way with a baseball cap
rides appearance
breaks nobody
even has child
indentations
present blood under radical conditions
kiss cheek earring hair throat necklace arm bicep tattoo
I speak sometimes
many boys not like married
that character
this underworld
there his stars
Family written and Armageddon
Culture 01 – Six
Kylie in a bath
shadow on a floor
woman’s forehead fighting the beast
start covering
Edie Falco in tigerskin
plenty of martial arts thrown in
that way survived a grimmer past
picture 15 year olds walking down the street
dead
arty and ponderous
bring your wellies
the scale’s intense
deforestation
Harry Potter weds
Don’t panic
That’s amazing
murder dead lovers with hotel soap
Good Morning,
My name is Colin and I am currently having a writer’s mid-life crisis of sorts. I have been writing in some form or other since I was about eight years old. To begin with it was mostly fiction, then poetry became and still is my main drive. I have tried scriptwriting, particularly comedy (my currently dormant satirical news website The Sceptical Poet can be found here if you want to see how satire dies), but I always come back to poetry and fiction. Writing is a function of my being by this point; I cannot turn it off. But it’s never been a financial success for me. I have veered over the years between constant submission of work to intermittent, plagued by disillusion, for a few years severe depression, and occasionally outright laziness. Of late, family commitments have limited my time. There have been some hits over the years but not as many as I’d like. It’s not a situation that I feel can continue in its current form.
So I have a plan. This blog is the start. It is a focus, a way of disciplining myself. This is the final push as they say. If I don’t succeed in writing I will be miserable, so I will make myself succeed even if it was never in the way I had always planned.
This is where the second part of the plan comes in. I have always avoided self-publication as I am well aware of the pitfalls of vanity publishing, but I see people I know distributing their work via the platforms the current technological age of wonder allows and achieving great creative satisfaction. In some cases financial satisfaction, but mostly I see them able to produce and distribute their work in their spare time, professionally, while still holding down full-time jobs, children and everything else, whether it’s music, writing, whatever. It’s inspiring.
And so, I’m following suit. I am planning, over the next year, to release all of my poetry to date in book form via Lulu.com, an online publishing and distributing service that allows writers creative freedom and professionally produced books available online on their site and via major outlets such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The released books will be publicised here, with sample poems. I’m very proud of them, and I’ve been working on getting them print-ready for a while, creating covers, etc..
The idea is to catch up with myself, so to speak. There will be several books over the year, which will leave me with a couple of poetry projects left which will follow at a later date, and I intend to focus more of my time after that on fiction. Specifically short stories and a novel which has plagued my existence for what feels like forever. The blog will always continue, and I will also post work in progress in gaps between books.
This is it now, this is the final stretch. Even if no-one buys a damn copy, the work will be there. The first book will be published within the next few weeks (hopefully the next few days). All information will be posted here. If you’re interested, please follow this blog by clicking on the link at the bottom of the main page. You can also keep track of this blog through its Facebook page, or by its twitter feed.
Thanks for listening.
I’ll speak to you guys soon,
Col.
the poet's cane 