Trish Harewood presents:
The prize-winning poet and short story writer, Dave Swann and his partner-in-crime, Murder Ballad rocker, Simon Finch. £4 waged, £3 unwaged.
David was brought up on the same Accrington street as the author Jeanette Winterson, his childhood neighbour. He later worked on the local rag, covering the matches of Accrington Stanley FC. He has also worked on newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands and London, and was writer-in-residence at Nottingham Prison (as well as a toilet cleaner at the legendary Paradiso night club in Amsterdam). He now teaches English at the University of Chichester. His short story collection, 'The Last Days of Johnny North' was published by Elastic Press (Norwich) in 2006. His poems and short stories have been widely published, and have won prizes in more than 50 competitions. He wants to ride downhill in a bath. It takes all sorts!
Click on 'comments' at the end of this posting to see example poems by Dave Swann.
Working in collaboration with Dave and bringing some of his most sinister murder ballads is Simon Finch, currently playing for a production of ‘The Third Policeman’. This is what Simon says about himself: 'I met Dave at 6th form college. We developed a common interest in absurd humour and sad songs. I play occasional solo gigs under the name of Cousin Simon .. which stuck after my cousin unimaginatively put me down as that on a bill he was organising. I have an unhealthy interest in 1950s country music. I also play in instrumental post-rock band Comfy Moss and take photographs.'
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Dave’s poem, The Hills, gives spine-tingling testimony to his Northern roots.
The hills
If they were boats, the rain had tipped them
the wrong way up, put their hulls in the sky.
If they were walls, the walls worked. They kept
strange things out. They put us in our place.
Their loneliness scared us. If they were prone
lions, they were old and under the weather.
If dogs, dogs that had gone off their back legs,
that lay around all day on the town’s edge
in loveless packs, the wind shivering in furs
of grass. Curs maybe. Unwardened, unlicensed.
You could beat them any way you liked:
stick in needles to make `phones work,
gouge them for slate. Their owners never came.
Sometimes they were less even than dogs,
sometimes they looked more like bodies
under sheets, in the rain. And finally
I knew them as trains, fleets of prows
pointing west, that restless folk rode away on.
And a poem that appealed strongly enough to Mario Petrucci, judge of the 2003 Bedford Open Competition, himself a writer on Chernobyl – to give it 1st prize alongside, co-incidentally, another of Dave’s poems, The Bunker.
Two winds
The summer after Chernobyl, I was taking
it slow up a ladder in Sweden,
painting a family’s high-gabled house.
It was easy work, save for the vertigo,
and I hit it off with the eldest son
who entertained me during rain-breaks
by calling my country shit: “It’s where
Sweden’s bad weather comes from!” “Look,” I said,
“you can hardly blame Britain for the wind!”
He knew better, took me to a lake – crystal-clear,
dead. Stirred its acid with a stick, looking
from his mosquito mask into my English face.
“And now there is another wind,” he said.
“Now we have two winds to think about.”
Maybe I was spooked. Maybe it was the height...
... but, soon after, I cracked a rare old window
with my blow-torch, and was paid off.
I recall cleaning brushes one last time,
noticing little blisters on my arms. It was days
since our lakeside walk and the bites were raw
but when I asked the blackberry pickers
for advice, they only shrugged. These were new flies,
they said, flies they didn’t know – and looked hard
through the rain, into the crackling brambles.
And finally to the short story form …"Dave Swann is, without doubt, one of the most vivid short story writers in the UK today. He brings the landscape and voices of the North to life with an energy that catapults his characters into the universal. Pathos. Irresistible comedy. The raw and beautiful stuff of everyday life. It's all here." - Alison MacLeod, author of 'The Wave Theory of Angels' (Penguin)
Post a Comment