“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.
REVIEWS
"Davies’ first collection, Bolt Down This Earth, also published by V. Press in 2017, was an exciting debut which I believe was the first book I reviewed for Litter online. The follow-up is a mature collection, reflecting some of the same preoccupations but with the distance of time and experience to bring both focus and depth to what is essentially a very personal outlook on the modern world.
"The subject matter involves issues of class, rural life, the relationship between virtual and ‘real’ reality, claustrophobia (in its broadest sense), poverty and disaffection based on circumstance and questions of mental health. [...]
"These poems are filled with anxiety and disturbing imagery yet they are also very much of their time, here and now, a present filled with uncertainty and a future best not projected into. There’s a confidence though, reflected in the form and variety of the writing [...]"
Steve Spence, Litter, full review here.
"Gram Joel Davies turns a forensic eye to working class life in these poems, amplifying the voices of the disadvantaged who are too busy existing and have too much to lose in feeling the rage to overturn systematic oppressions he wants to draw attention to.
"It is so refreshing to read about working class life without feeling as if the writer is just ranting or using ‘edgy’ vocabulary to trot out stereotypes. Davies is raw and chronicles lives that get overlooked and does so with craft and class."
Emma Lee, Emma Lee's Blog, full review here.
“[…] there is an angst buzzing like an electric current throughout the work. In many ways, it is capturing the crackle that has been in the air for the last few years, the sense that things are out of kilter and could go snap at any time. […]
“The hurt and strangeness of the world in Not Enough Rage, is encapsulated in those lines [the last 6 lines of the opening stanza of ‘How Many Nights’], the ‘glass corpse filled with hornets’ image is brilliant, and an example of what these poems can offer by way of originality. There is also a tenderness that hovers at the edge of the collection, looking for opportunities to show itself. In “World Away”, the opening poem, the goal was ‘to show the world’ that what matters is words, and ‘what happens’ with words that touch the nervous system ‘like a taper / to a gas-tap.’ In poems such as “How Many Nights” that goal is certainly met. As for the title of the collection, there seems to be plenty of rage in these poems; we all know there is plenty for Gram Joel Davies to rage against, and poetry that shows its teeth is sometimes no bad thing.”
Neil Elder, London Grip, full review here.
“Wherever you open this splendid collection you’ll be overwhelmed by tumbling, tumultuous impressionistic images and memories, the sights, sounds and smells of snapshots [...]Davies has a real gift for using simple language to convey powerful complex images, which in turn tell yet more.”
Melissa Todd, The Journal, issue 70.
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