Tag Archives: books

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

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photo credit: Andrew Taylor

It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Cliff Yates. I met him on an excellent online workshop he ran for the Poetry Business. They published his New & Selected Poems, which brings together poems from five earlier publications – over thirty years of ‘inimitable’ work. Poignancy, economy, humour, a touch of the surreal…

You can find Cliff’s biography and the link to his website below the poems.

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

Day breaks deliberate as a petrol station
newspapers and expensive flowers
but you’re tired of vacuum-packed sandwiches
and sordid headlines.

On the 15.07 out of Deansgate
she’s reading The Holy Sinner.
The dog opposite smiles
through its muzzle.
Coffee, or maybe something’s on fire
we do appear to be speeding
unless we’re stationary and the landscape’s
rattling past. ‘It’s been a good day,’
she says, ‘it makes up for yesterday.’
‘Why, what happened yesterday?’

Days without rain and suddenly it rains.
Another country, your body’s not your own.
You want to go for a walk. In this?

He threw a stick for the dog in Habberley Valley
the tattoo flew from his arms
landed in the bracken like leaves.

Dog

So many places closed: the off-licence,
the butcher, the corner shop, even
the telephone box screwed shut.
Dog had come a long way, and now what?

The cherry blossom, he noted,
looking up for once from the pavement,
was particularly stunning this year,
maybe it was the same every year

but noticing it, his heart was lifted
and he decided not to be disappointed.
The journey had been arduous, the future
was uncertain, but there is more to life,

he reflected, cocking his leg against the letter box,
than a bowl of fruit on a table.

The Lesson

The nun points out the ones to watch:
the boy in the corner, the girl at the back.
In this class it’s the boy in the middle
who thinks he’s a cat.

Outside, workmen are felling trees.
A bird’s nest tumbles in through the window,
lands on a desk. Inside the nest, a baby bird.
It’s okay it’s okay, the children say,
Brian will know what to do.

The boy who thinks he’s a cat
gathers the bird and, holding it
at arm’s length in the cup of his hands,
heads for the door, the nun behind him
between the silent rows of children
and the bird, as if on cue, lifts up its beak and sings.

Lighthouse

The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier.
We watch it in our red pyjamas.
Actually, neither of us are wearing red pyjamas.
You’re wearing my blue shirt.

The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier.
It’s the only thing we can be sure of.
Everything’s uncertain
since you set alight my record collection.

I’m trying to work out an appropriate reaction,
rearranging things in my head to eliminate
all memory of the record collection.
The lighthouse flickers on and off.

Actually it doesn’t, you point out, it just appears to.
You look amazing in my blue shirt.
I haven’t words to describe how good you look
in the light from the lighthouse. Now you’re here

now you’re not. Maybe I should burn
something of yours, you suggest.
Your voice leaves me in the dark.
It doesn’t sound like you when I can’t see you.

Cliff Yates was born in Birmingham and has been publishing poetry since the 1980s. His New & Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2023) brings together work from various collections including Henry’s Clock  (Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition), Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Arts Council England Writers Award) and Jam (ACE Grant for the Arts). He taught English at Maharishi School in Skelmersdale and wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School during his time as Poetry Society poet-in-residence, following the success of his students in poetry competitions. He has led courses for, among others, the Arvon Foundation and the British Council.

Cliff’s site: https://cliffyates.wordpress.com/

Having Her Cake

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It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.

Having her Cake

The chocolate cake, left over
from her annual pre-Christmas do
sits on a large white china plate,
dwindling in size day by day,
an unwashed fork lying next to it,
a temptation to any passers-by,
though no one ever sees
anyone else eating it
and it would have been sacrilege
to open the cutlery drawer,
select a clean fork,
place the used one in the sink
or the dishwasher, but someone
on the third day I’m there removes
the plate, crumb-covered and sticky,
replaces it with a tidy paper version
tucking the now over-large piece
of cling-film around the edges
clumsily, carelessly, as if
it no longer mattered, as if
at any moment it could be binned
plate and all.

What you can’t wake

The dead. No, not even the dogs,
grumbling at being shut
in their crates, beside her bed
peering through the grate, eyes
full of reproach.

No, you can’t wake the dead,
but the not-quite-dead
are too awake, their eyes
peeled until the last,
their flesh jumpy,
their muscles braced.

Beneficiary

Released from the need to worry
for herself, she frets
about the falling stock market
on behalf of her beneficiary,
a willowy young hairdresser,
the daughter she never had,
who will inherit everything:
the rambling shambolic bungalow
with its million and one flaws:
the water pressure that shuts down
the whole system when the shower is on,
necessitating bouts of shouting,
water, water if someone so much as
turns on a tap to rinse a cup,
brushes teeth, flushes the toilet
in any other part of the house —
a second-hand Honda Jazz,
a rusting dishwasher, a dog run
which looks like a concentration camp
for canines, meant to be protection
from ‘critters out there,’
and the stock market falling,
falling, falling.

Biography


Widely published and the winner of many prizes, Wendy Klein is a retired psychotherapist, born in New York and brought up in California. Since leaving the U.S. in 1964, she has lived in Sweden, France, Germany, and England. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s death when she was nine months old, her nomadic years as a young single mother and subsequent travel. She has published three collections: Cuba in the Blood (2009) and Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, and Mood Indigo (2016), from Oversteps Books., plus a new and selected, Out of the Blue (2019) from The High Window Press. Her first pamphlet Let Battle Commence (2020) from Dempsey & Windle, was based on her great grandfather’s letters home while serving as a Confederate Officer in the US Civil War. She shares her work on https://www.cronepoet.com.

Books – Unread & Banned

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Last year I wrote about the ‘Ongelezen Boeken Club’ (Unread Books Club), a new venture where libraries promoted books on the ‘null list’ – books that have never been taken out.

This year, the ‘Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag’ (National Day of Unread Books) coincides with another new initiative: De Week van het Verboden Boek (The Week of Forbidden Books). Bookshops and libraries throughout the country are showcasing books that have been or are still censored.

On Wikipedia, you can find an article on book censorship, a list of banned books and the main list of books banned by governments. This starts with the Bible and Albania and ends with Yugoslavia.

If I counted correctly: 66 countries. ‘Almost every country places some restrictions on what may be published, although the emphasis and the degree of control differ from country to country and at different periods.’

Wikipedia lists 66 books that have been or are currently banned in India. A small number, relatively speaking. The earliest is a Gujarati translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj. This was banned by the British Authorities in 1909. In August 2025, the Indian Home Department banned 25 books for ‘propagating false narrative and secessionism in Jammu and Kashmir.’

Here in The Netherlands, there is only one book officially banned: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1924). In 2014, a bookshop owner in Amsterdam was found to stock and sell the book. There was no prosecution.

However, training for new staff in bookshops routinely includes how to deal with aggressive customers. Library staff find returned books with pages torn out. A Dutch survey last year found that (1 in 7) authors had to deal with aggression, threats, intimidation – much of it online.

Here is the cover of Lale Gul’s debut published in 2021, when she was 23. It’s an autobiographical account of growing up in a strict Islamic family. It became a bestseller and was translated, but Lale has since been in hiding.

If Tallinn is on your bucket list, you can visit the Banned Books Museum while you’re there!

Photo credit: Fuzheado

Saved by bankruptcy

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Photo credit: Pieter van Marion, NL

I had booked return flights Manchester – Exeter to visit my poet friend Kathleen. My trip was going to be in the third week of March 2020. On the 5th of March Flybe filed for administration and ceased all operations immediately. I lost £65, but I was very relieved: If I had flown to Exeter, I might well have been stuck in Devon as that first lockdown started…


On Sunday 15 March I learned the British government was considering a compulsory quarantine. The next day I emailed the owner of the campsite asking if I could arrive early. He replied immediately. I booked a flight, transferred money, packed, agonised over which poetry books to take to my ‘desert island’ near The Hague. I flew to Schiphol on the Wednesday. The local buses already had the area near the driver closed off with white-red plastic.


Here are two poems about that first lockdown:

The departure

Half a century condensed into Brexit, pandemic.
At the threat of a four-month’ compulsory
quarantine I fled to my bolthole in Holland.

Six months of safety in a static caravan,
waking to birdsong each morning,
shielded from the sun by the golden elm.
I walked my daily rounds on the grass lanes.

Forsythia, tulips, narcissi, rhododendron,
pyracantha, salvia, rock rose, asters:
the seasons’ steady markers. From a distance
I waved to neighbours finally arriving.

In the cupboard of the spare room
lay the letter confirming my ‘settled status’
on the other side of the North Sea.

The undertakers

A double spread in the paper
features a large photo.

This man, in his thirties, a narrow
horizontal moustache, soft smile.

He sits in a wooden boat, his right hand
resting on a plain white coffin.

People are asked to email text and selfies.
Made into cards, these are placed on the coffin.

He is based in Amsterdam, will transport
you safely through the canals.

That undertaker has just opened a crematorium.
He also owns a chain of hotels.

The pandemic has cut the numbers allowed
to be in the room. There is livestreaming.

People, he says, are glad of it.
The intimacy makes it easier to speak.

At the end of September 2020, the campsite closed. I got a Covid test somewhere in the centre of The Hague and flew back to Manchester.

Late lockdown poem

I wake up and know, of course,
that I am not a morning person.
The sound of rain, of course,
and fewer sirens as people
are supposed to be at home.
My lifelines are the same, of course:
motto, comfort break, medication.
Of course, I think about exercise,
settle for Composer of the Week,
dead, of course.

Marie-Louise Park, Didsbury, Manchester, UK

A postage stamp, Joshua calls it

He’s right and there’s traffic noise
from the main road and people
with dogs on long leads,
but not all the benches
are dedicated to the dead,
Marie-Louise is a pretty name
for a park and the 43 Airport bus
is a hybrid and no-one much
was going to the airport
that autumn: I often had the bus
to myself, both ways.

Breakfast

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Here in The Netherlands Kookboekenweek (Cookery Books Week) has just ended. A recent annual event, it’s designed to promote cookery books. Bookshops and libraries organise workshops, lectures, and tasting events. Of course, it’s all to encourage people to buy books as presents for December: St Nicolaas and Kerstmis.


Professionals shortlisted six books (Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (2), and baking skills). They’ve chosen Bloem Suiker Boter, by Nicola Lamb, translated into Dutch. I’m going with Breakfast, a poem celebrating poetry and friendship.

Breakfast

Bridie would be in the kitchen,
barking with Finn and Tara
in a metal cage under the table.
I’m in your backroom, sheepskin
on the seat of the wooden chair,
just gone 9 o’clock this Tuesday.

You’ve made the scrambled eggs
exactly as I like them, with enough
mustard and fresh chives.
Now you’re coming in with yours,
followed by your small dogs
who settle on the settee, by the fire.

We catch up over this monthly meal.
Soon we’ll sit silently behind our laptops,
typing up poems from old notebooks.
Now eating toast with ginger preserve,
I look out of the window; the smiling
Buddha is lit up by the sun.

The unread book

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Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books.

Upstairs, around 200.000 books are on loan. If a book is not taken out during a period of two to three years, it moves onto the ‘null list’ and disappears downstairs. Here a good 400.000 books are stored along 24 km of shelving. At the exhibition, there is an old-fashioned telephone on which visitors can ring and reserve one of the unread books on the ‘nul lijst’.

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

This is the cover of a historical novel, Gewassen Vlees, by Thomas Rosenboom. It won the dutch Libris prize (worth 50,000 Euros) in 1995. It’s over 700 pages long. I am never going to read it. A friend gave it to me. He died in 2000 and that’s the reason it’s still taking up shelf space.

Mothering Sunday – a poem

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Credit: Silviarita via Pixabay

Today It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK and Ireland, and Summer Time begins. I want to thank Hilary Robinson for letting me share her poem, a gentle homeward journey with rich detail. It also shows how a strong title pulls the reader in. Hilary is the guest poet next month with more poems from her poetry debut Revelation.

Things I Say to my Mum in the Nursing Home

Let’s go to Verdon’s for a quarter of sweets—
American Cream Soda, Rainbow Crystals.
Let me taste the Sarsaparilla Drops,
Fruit Salads, Flying saucers, Cherry Lips.

Walk me up to Marsden’s — I’ll sink
my fingers into dried peas, watch
as butter’s cut and patted into shape;
sugar’s wrapped in rough blue bags.

Take me to the monkey-nut shop
after an hour in Northmoor Library,
breathing in the leather, old-book smell,
where the men scour papers for good news.

Hold my hand, take me to the park
so I can swing high, standing up,
or roly-poly down the slopes,
risk roundabouts, the Wedding Cake.

Take me back to our backyard,
to the tin bath hung on an outside wall,
to my stiff, hard dolls, my teddy bear.
Pass me my square of pink flannelette.

Table 64 – writing prompt

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Credit: Pexels on Pixabay

This week my friend Valerie celebrated her birthday. We met 30 years ago on a residential week in Spain. To celebrate our friendship, here is a short poem in which we’re together. Bowler’s is a very large indoor and outdoor carboot sale location in Manchester.


That Generation Game is a tv game show in which teams of two family members, but from a different generation compete. The winners see a conveyor belt with goodies wobble past. No worries: if they can’t remember them all, the studio audience will shout to help …

Table 64

We carried the plastic crates and cardboard
boxes into Bowlers at bloody six o’clock.
The locusts, proper traders, picked items
from the piles we carried, threw us
pound coins and a few fivers.

The early flurry was good and then it was
like the Generation Game in reverse:
suitcases went, a pile of books, glasses,
a wok, costume jewellery, some cuddly toys.
We sat back in our folding chairs like regulars,
holding off sleep.

Writing Prompt: Did you do a car boot sale with a friend? Were you a market trader (for real or in your dreams)? Did you go to an auction of lost property? What is the object that you lost or found?