Marsden Bay

James Kirkup, Red Squirrel Press, £6.99
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?marsden

James Kirkup is a poet and translator who was born In South Shields in 1918, and now lives in Andorra. He has published several dozen poetry collections and this latest collection is full of jarring vitality and teems with life (and death). In ‘A Last Wish’ he states: “I often wanted to/ cut somebody’s head of/ so as to hear the sound/ of blood streaming/ from the jugular” while in ‘Beijing Flu’, “I lie night after night/ listening for the next spasm-/ how musical the strings of phlegm/ the keyboards of cataarh!” We also get poignant little vignettes. ‘In Memory of Yamaguchi Takeyoshi’ concerns a librarian (now deceased); ‘For A Friend Who Died Of AIDS’ is self explanatory; and the brilliant final poem, ‘Final Scores’ is about the poet’s father, who he never really got to know and whose memory is constantly evoked by the weekly radio readings of football scores. (The filling in of football coupons was one of the only things that they ever did together). This is a superbly readable collection hanging meat on the bones of the passing of time. DP

Taken from THE CRACK
http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=2&category=17