Everything is Scripted
£6.00
KEATS HOUSE LAUNCH: Took place on Tuesday 27th September
Everything is Scripted is the winner of the 2016 Templar Pamphlet & Collection Award.
This surreal collection of visionary poems - dreams, fantasies, nightmares - entices readers into forensic insights on fathers and sons and their emotional journeys - real and imagined. An extract from 'My Dad the Politician'.
My Dad the Politician
The question of how he became Prime Minister
remains unanswered, our hopes resting
in his relatively small hands. He wears a suit
made of prime sirloin steak to illustrate
both his position in the Cabinet and hunger
for power. He has eased seamlessly
into the version of himself that tested highest
with the focus groups. Each morning
his choice of tie is a military operation.
Bring in the big guns, he shouts, and out rolls
his tank-come-tie-rack. His options lassoed
around the barrel, still warm from the gunpowder.
...
James Giddings was born in 1990 in Johannesburg and now lives in Sheffield where he studied for an MA in Writing.
His poems have been published widely both in journals and online and in 2015 he won a Northern Writers Award.
'.. the poems about fathers, where iconic movie images - the parachute jump, the body in a freezer - take on a strange, moving new charge. For Giddings we are all pretending: fumbling our lines, waiting for the director to yell 'Cut!' This pamphlet deserves to be a blockbuster.' – Clare Pollard
