Alarum

by Wayne Holloway-Smith

Overview

The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith’s first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. ‘A single crow falling from the mind’ of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the ‘air itself’ is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780373317
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	03/23/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	255 KB

About the Author

Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. He received his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Brunel University in 2015. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His pocketbook, Beloved, in case you’ve been wondering was published by Donut Press in 2011. He co-edits the online journal Poems in Which and teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. His first book-length collection, Alarum, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

Table of Contents

I

The air itself 11

If I forget this, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth 12

Some Waynes 14

The Warning Notes 15

Everything is always sometimes broken 16

Doo-wop 18

No Worries 19

So Many Different Ways to Talk About the Same Thing 20

What Happened Was This 22

There is absolutely no way to make this real life interesting 23

Cake 26

Worship Music 27

Self Portrait #2 28

I hope this will explain everything: 29

(Some Violence) 31

II

The Politics of Birds 47

The Language 48

Sarah Sarsaparilla 49

Sympathy for Toast 50

Grandfather, with Flowers 51

Self Portrait #3 52

Poem in Which 53

Please understand 54

If I'm Ever to Find These Trees Meaningful I Must Have You by the Thighs 55

Why 57

Pear Tree 58

Lucky 59

He left the body as fluids 60

Alarum 61

Short 62

Notes 64