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.
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