Time's Guest by Kevin Graham PRE-ORDER
Published September 2025. Available for pre-order.
I'll get it right, this thing I want to say . . . Many of the poems in Kevin Graham's second collection find themselves outdoors - in woods, along the coast, down alleyways - by turns praising the natural world and mourning its evidential ruin. Time is the throughline and its paradox is uncompromising - 'we shake the hand / of time and face an unbreakable fact' ('Walking Home Drunk from The 1975'). Elsewhere, music and art inform jubilant lyrics that meditate on luminaries from J M Synge, Jack B Yeats and J M W Turner to The Frames, The War on Drugs and My Bloody Valentine. The central sequence 'The Company of Trees' plays with the language of ecology and literary history while 'Easter 2024' riffs on W B Yeats's 'Easter 1916' for the modern era. 'To brace like a river / getting deeper by the minute' he muses in 'Babes in the Wood'. Rooted in the everyday and otherworldly - both formal and free - these are poems that yearn for company and to be read and re-read.
I'll get it right, this thing I want to say . . . Many of the poems in Kevin Graham's second collection find themselves outdoors - in woods, along the coast, down alleyways - by turns praising the natural world and mourning its evidential ruin. Time is the throughline and its paradox is uncompromising - 'we shake the hand / of time and face an unbreakable fact' ('Walking Home Drunk from The 1975'). Elsewhere, music and art inform jubilant lyrics that meditate on luminaries from J M Synge, Jack B Yeats and J M W Turner to The Frames, The War on Drugs and My Bloody Valentine. The central sequence 'The Company of Trees' plays with the language of ecology and literary history while 'Easter 2024' riffs on W B Yeats's 'Easter 1916' for the modern era. 'To brace like a river / getting deeper by the minute' he muses in 'Babes in the Wood'. Rooted in the everyday and otherworldly - both formal and free - these are poems that yearn for company and to be read and re-read.
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