The Front Room

This week, I sent a friend my poetry collection Suburbs of the Soul. Don't rush to Amazon to buy your own copy. It's not available online. Or in the shops. Or anywhere else. It is, in fact, a PDF document I put together in about an hour, issued by my personal imprint Snowglobe Press (who also "publish" my hand-drawn birthday and Christmas cards).

The "collection" is twenty-eight pages long (with photographs I copied and pasted), containing some of the poems I wrote over thirty years.

Re-reading them, I honestly think some of the poems I wrote in my teens and twenties (and afterwards) were pretty good. So much work went into them. And so much thought!

Here is one I don't think I've ever published on the blog, but which I think is fairly good. It was inspired by an actual photograph of an actual "sweet girl graduate" (to quote a different poem on a similar subject), clutching her script and wearing her mortarboard, in an actual front room. I wrote it in 2003.

The Front Room

Whoever took a photograph that was not sad?

A million mantlepieces bear their tender gloom

Of seasons all gone sour, and dreams gone to the bad,

And summer sunlight chilly with the touch of doom.

Those fragile smiles, those background faces’ vacant stares!

(The dust motes flicker in the front room’s morning sun.)

What camera caught these troubled glances, unawares?

Whose sombre face is this, so failing to have fun?

But sadder than all of these, the "happiest moment" snaps;

The beaming bride, the rose-cheeked girl in mortarboard.

Surely joy lingers here? Perhaps. And yet perhaps

These pictures capture all the joy our lives afford.

Look deep, and see the wistfulness their bright eyes hide.

(The lonely front room tingles with the old clock’s chime.)

What shade lies on this graduate? What ails this bride?

What sadness tinctured in the darkroom of sly Time?