Saturday, June 18, 2016

Review: Hitting The Black Wall

Paul Scott Bates hails from Rossendale in Lancashire, blogs under the name Greenfield Cygnus and can also be found writing articles for Louderthanwar, amongst other publications.
Hitting the Black Wall is a collection of 65 poems that are a surprisingly dark offering from a happily-married father of four and grandfather of one; but then these things do not preclude a person from hitting a black wall, do they?
They circle around death, isolation and self-destruction: the first poem, Gone, is about a shooting from the perspective of a murderer (terribly apt at the time of writing). The poetry  in this volume describes a fight against demons, with the bittersweet success/failure of a completed suicide of a friend reminding us just how fragile is our hold on sanity and hope.
Some, for instance Janine, Silensore and You Left Me Standing In The Rain, are crying out to be made into songs. The most complex, Josephine, is the darkest and most powerful: reflections on a car crash centred on the deceased passenger who didn’t wear her seat belt. Josephine sums up the collection, which will appeal to fans of Scandi-noir looking to savour a cloudy weekend exploring the darker realms of the soul.

More about the launch, and the book, can be found here: www.hiapoetry.blogspot.co.uk

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