Bill Griffiths

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Biographical note:  Bill Griffiths was born in Middlesex in 1948. He began writing poetry and publishing in 1970, benefitting from the guidance of Eric Mottram, Bob Cobbing, and many others on the little press scene. He went on to study Old English at King’s College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1987. He is Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Northern Studies, Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and lives in Seaham, County Durham.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710751
ISBN-10:  1844710750
ISBN-13:  9781844710751
Author:  Bill Griffiths
Title:  The Mud Fort
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-04
Extent:  292pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  17 mm
Weight:  438 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This book draws together a major selection of poems from 1984-2004. Including works on London, sport, boats, cartoons, food, the classics, the mystical, history, crime, and the North. A taut, rhythmic verse, with respect for word-sound and a cheering disregard for consensus on history, language and ‘poetry’.

Table of contents:
The Mud Fort
Reflection
Shim Gets His Apartment Back
The Teddy Bear to Jay
Awake
How Shim Found a Box of Skyscrapers
Reverie
Bob Cobbing in London
A Tale of a Head
Back Garden
In the Suburbs
The Best Jigsaw
Speedway
Riding By
At the Junction with the Slough Arm
The Trip Up the Stort
Shanties
Coast Poem
The Ship
The Festival
Boat Telly
Conan
Conan in Trouble
Kamandi
Spider Man
Bee-Bike
In a Heap
Abroad
Jingle
In the Larder
“De Apio”
Citrus Note
Tokaj
Cake
Found Potato Poem
Reverie
Shopping
The Sprout
Carrots
Moretum
The Primrose City
Introduction to a Library
Like Greek
The Labyrinth
Claudian on Dragons
On Providence
On Nature and Contemplation and the One
MFV Golden Arrow
A Science
Hanuman
Xmas 1
Xmas 2
Xmas 3
Xmas 4
Xmas 5
Nativity
The Flight
Zero
Beyond
Metamorphoses
On the Sun
Self-Analysis
Planning for the Future
#Astrolabe
The Miracle
The Brothers
Dance
Nocturns and Diurnes
Hand Complex
Last Judgement
From My Cave
Evolving From
Toy World
Histories
Grief that the Palestinians are Treated like a Tribe of Onions
Benin
Ushabtis
Transition
A Few
Oran
In Malaya
In Kenya
The Mineral World
To the Edge
N.I.
Predicting
Medical Histories
Hungary
Medcal Report
The Peacock Variations
The Fate of King Alfred
The Toxteth Riots
The Profession of Gypsydom
Umbro
Liam’s Song
Star Fish Jail
How Highpoint is Better than Wandsworth
Quad
Sequence
Colchester
Carnival
NY 1
NY 2
NY3
Darren in the Alps
In the Himalayas
Local
Iin the Ealy Hours
In Walls
The Genesis of Iron
Achievement
On the Platform at Stockton
In the Great North Forest
At the Gateshead Garden Festival
Birthday Poem
In the Attic
Uptown
Starting Up with Doves
The Box-Eggs
Reverie 6.
Reverie no. 9.
In the Rush to Man the Shields Lifeboat
Ballad of Orgreave
In the Coral Year
The Tug

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Excerpt from book:  

Reverie

At the gate in the wall
park–scent
of may, chestnut,
green almond, the grass, fish–ponds

ornamental knots
of youngsters;
practice with car–stereos

and a white over–sky
the grand collation of bone: we are
scenic

So, possessions.
So, writings.
And so on.

For if you moved,
there would be running,
wild breath, leading to
shameful fruit–wars . . .
you wd have to settle for centuries of sun.

People with what are virtually pre–electronic brains
are able to express fatigue.
In the form of a wall.

Unpublished endorsement :  To have even a part of Bill Griffiths’ writing of the past decades widely available is an event to be welcomed. Mercurially self-effacing – a Pepper’s Ghost on the stage of poetry – Bill has kept the down-home of the reality based community honest and welcoming: generous music.

Tom Raworth

Unpublished endorsement :  Griffiths’s poetry sings among the bogus, as Basil Bunting might have said, with an insouciant yet high musical intelligence almost unique among contemporary poets. The poet’s sense of local and wider history, his concern for the human soul (an old concept here made new in a materialist age), his dazzling lexical virtuosity, his range of forms and his commitment to vital scholarly investigation of a long range past combine to posit a fundamental challenge to all authoritarian claims to truth, especially the totalitarian reduction of human consciousness to the present and immediate: that degrading reality crust of postmodern confidence. The poetry runs the gamut of human perception from the comic to the mystical and from the lyrical to the tragic. Human achievement and human failure are dispassionately articulated in a world where Blakean contraries have full play. His is a unique and unrepeatable voice speaking with an unnerving accuracy in our time.

Clive Bush