John Lucas's new collection makes extraordinary poetry out of ordinary life - a pint of beer, a cup of coffee, jazz, poetry and the history of 'Bloody England'. With subtle craft and wry wit, he locates his democratic art in everyday conversation, remembered, overheard, imagined. Lucas's anarchic poetic alter-ego Thorn Gruin turns up as usual, joined here by the ghosts of Socrates, Gary Sobers, George Crabbe, Brian Clough and Duke Ellington, a flock of starlings, an army of Daves and the not-so-legendary Doug Haskin's Hot Six. From domestic interiors to international politics, Flute Music is a manifesto to the provincial and the urban, the domestic and the familial, a book that is proud to takes sides with the 'ragged-arsed' and the 'common' against all 'swats' and 'toffs' everywhere.
John Lucas will be reading from Flute Music at a launch event on Wednesday 29th November at 7.30 p.m., at Sam's Place, 144 Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough: tickets £2, on the door.
"Lucas's poems have the essential timbre of integrity and humanity, they are a declaration of what life could and should be."
Poetry Wales
"Lucas is a dab hand at social observation. The language crackles with colloquial art."
The Guardian
"Sometimes, reading the Sunday-paper celebrities of our time, I fear I don't like poetry. It's a relief to come across the real thing again."
Herbert Lomas
John Lucas is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent. He is the author of many scholarly and critical works, including studies of Dickens, John Clare, Arnold Bennett, Ivor Gurney and several books on English poetry, Romantic and Modern writing. His translations of the poems of Egils Saga are an Everyman Modern Classic.
He has published seven previous books of poetry, About Nottingham (1971), Studying Grosz on the Bus (1989), Flying to Romania (1992), One for the Piano (1997), On the Track (2000), A World Perhaps : New and Selected Poems (2002) and The Long and the Short of It (2004).
He has played cornet with many jazz groups in the Nottingham area, where he has lived since 1964. He runs Shoestring Press.
Flute Music, John Lucas
ISBN-13: 978-0-9551061-4-9
ISBN-10: 0-9551061-4-1
Price: £7.95
Order Flute Music from Inpress.
