V. Press is very very excited to launch Not Enough Rage by Gram Joel Davies.
“It’s rare for me to recognise, and feel kinship for, a lot of contemporary poetry. I recognise and feel kinship with this. Not Enough Rage is like a series of controlled explosions. Trembling houses. A burning voice. Experience dismantled and sewn back together with glowing needles and a mouth full of stars.”
Bobby Parker
“Like a Dylan Thomas of the age of mental illness, Gram Joel Davies leaps and flies through the world with dark exuberance. These are speakable poems, full of love for unlovable places and impossible people. In touch with but not tied to rap's rhymes and rhythms, this collection, for me, shifts the modern world into the painful focus of real poetry.”
Peter Oswald
Not Enough Rage is very heady and very gutsy.
ISBN: 978-1-7398838-7-4
62 pages
R.R.P. £10.99
A sample poem can be enjoyed below.
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Tourist in My Own Town
Nobody chooses which home to grow up in.
I’ve become like gapers or beachcombers,
where the houses overlook a tar-stained groyne.
Our terrace, filled by other lives,
a street that centres on the eye
like sea horizon. There, a door
I stood one time.
In the form of flip-flopper or pebble-hoarder,
I’ve imagined ways it could have been
– no polished bone – another middle house.
No mother who ate mussels closed or talked
towards her children as if ready-grown.
In the home I didn’t choose. On the step
I stood alone. Out along the sound:
three doors down.
Now I’ve turned to paddler, dipper dabbling
in rockpool life. Beyond the briny walls
in which a father may have pinched himself
and woken up a hermit, crabshelled,
sunken with a chest of gold
tobacco and green wine. Not the home
I wanted then – out along the prom
some length – three before the end.
I’ve taken on the faces of the flingers
and the fetchers, reckoning the lookout hut,
whose windows ring its stippled sections,
was the place a sister (last who fled)
once pierced her lips and other places,
painted all points red. Not a home selected,
on the edge of land. Sleeves rolled downward,
three along the strand.
From deck chairs by the channels, curved
through sandbanks, where I’ve consumed
the views of masted roofs, and thought about
a brother who took every brunt and buffet.
How, perhaps, he caught a wave.
This isn’t where I meant to be, three
before the end, out from the mainland.
Bucking on the trend.
