Cliff Yates

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Biographical note:  Cliff Yates was born in Birmingham. His first collection, Henry’s Clock, won both the Aldeburgh first collection prize and the Poetry Business book & pamphlet competition. Pamphlets include 14 Ways of Listening to the Archers and Emergency Rations. He wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society) and teaches at Maharishi School, where his students are renowned for winning poetry competitions. He received a 2003 Arts Council England Writer’s Award.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715039
ISBN:  9781844715039
Author:  Cliff Yates
Title:  Frank Freeman’s Dancing School
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  From Kidderminster to Paris, via Swansea and the Antarctic, these poems are preoccupied with stories, the nature of memory and identity. Things aren’t what they seem: background becomes foreground, the hidden and the periphery snap into focus. Compelling, tender and provocative; acutely observed and seriously funny.

Main description:  These poems are preoccupied with stories, the nature of memory, and identity. Many are love poems. From Kidderminster to Paris via Swansea and the Antarctic, taking in a Viennese café and the mysterious Planet X, the work comes close to the edge but remains sure-footed. Things aren’t what they seem: background becomes foreground, the periphery and the hidden snap into focus, and ‘the photographs on the mantelpiece pull themselves together’. If these poems were an accident, they’d be a train crash: survivors would come round in a different country, dust off their clothes, barely recognise themselves or each other. The poems are in charge of the remote and make full use of it: a Sunday afternoon in suburbia cuts to a journal of polar exploration. Events unfold simultaneously, casting strange lights on each other. Parallel worlds? time travel? or the way in which memories stand beside experience, nudging and colouring it, transforming it into something new and exraordinary. Janet Fisher describes the work as ‘a sort of martial art: it stands there looking slight and friendly but in reality it's using the reader's own strength against herself till she ends up flat on the mat not knowing what's hit her.’ These poems draw you in, again and again. Compelling, tender and provocative; acutely observed and seriously funny.

Table of contents:
Emergency Rations
Lighthouse
Locked In
Thank You for the Postcard I Read It
Emergency Rations are Tasting Better and Better
Fishing
He Squeezes Tennis Balls to Strengthen his Hands
On the Third Day
Leaves are Just Thin Wood
Summers
The Morning they Set Off it was Snowing
Daglingworth Blues
There are Mountains but I Can’t See Them
Cross Country
Day Breaks as a Petrol Station
L’Hermitage and a Bird
Hotel de l’Angleterre
Shoes
Would You Listen to the Safety Instructions Please
At the Smell of the Old Dog
Proportion
Apple Trees in a Gale
Baldwin Road
Frank Freeman’s Dancing School
New White Bike
Hair
Yes
Fun
Borneo
Your Limbs Bound and Mouth Full of Cloth
In the Mountains of Truth You Will Never Climb in Vain
Picking Up Speed
Kidderminster-on-Sea
Climbing the Tree to Pick Fruit he Fell and Lost
Wake Up
The Ruler of Planet X
Return
When She Got Back After Her Funeral
Gower Road
Mid-Gallop
10 Easy Pieces for Piano
Vienna
Guitarist
Iowa
On Police Records
Rock Cross
Noise
Fireside Bookshop
Knowledge of this Sort Helps Keep Society Together
Still Alive
Satsang with Paul
The Muleteer in the Orange Shirt
Shape
Chinese New Year
The Poem
Spade Bucket Apple
On the Street in Bratislava
Boggle Hole
Mirror
Fever
The Science of Predictive Astrology
Fall
I Am a Crab
Oxygen Tent
Bike Ride
Snow
Chez Marianne

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Excerpt from book:  

Kidderminster-on-Sea

Travellers journey to the Seven Stars to witness
the equinox tide lap the plinth of Baxter’s statue.
You can buy cockles on Coventry Street, fish
for eels off the Swan Centre, cast your net
in Castle Street and come up with a view
of the market?: renovated clocks, gravy drowning …

Ricky robbed his old man’s meter
to pay off a dealer in Telford there’s a statue of him
somewhere. Joe got married, lived on Hurcott Road
until she hit him with the kitchen door. He moved out,
pretended he knew your mother in the flat
above the bus station they demolished before he found Jesus.

There are relics in St George’s Park buried under the bench
overlooking the bowling green where we turned on
the tramps in our lunch hour. O where are you now Charlie
shouting in greeting the name that we gave you
a thousand miles from Poland, the only English you know.

Unpublished endorsement:  Cliff Yates is one of my favourite poets, writing in an idiom I’d like to call ‘Skelmersdale Mystic/Domestic’ if he was in a band that band would produce hit singles that would linger in your head for years and if he was a greengrocer his vegetables would always be startling shapes. There’s childhood here, and love, and a way of seeing the world with the wrappers off that is, ultimately, Yatesian.

Ian McMillan

Unpublished endorsement:  Cliff Yates is one of our best poets. His poems are among the most exciting, challenging and unpredictable of any being written now or for donkey's years.

Peter Sansom

Unpublished endorsement:  A sort of martial art: it stands there looking slight and friendly but in reality it's using the reader's own strength against herself till she ends up flat on the mat not knowing what's hit her.

Janet Fisher

Previous review quote:  Philosophy runs smudged into daily life… he offers us the surprise borne of unconstrained freedom….that combination of precision with the seemingly random that gives this short collection such expansive range.

Ben Felsenburg
Incwriters

Previous review quote:  Yates is an absolute master… he stretches and dares you to properly understand what you are reading. He makes you want to read and re-read his work.…. Technically stunning and always there are more questions than answers.

Steve Anderson
New Hope International

Previous review quote:  If you like poetry firmly rooted in the real world, the everyday, this is not the book for you. You will be seduced into thinking it is, because everyday situations seem to be what is being described, but you will soon find that prisms and mirrors, flashbacks and flash-forwards, parallel universes etc. come into play. You are never where you think you are, which for me is one of the purposes of poetry.

Lyn Moir
Sphinx Chapbook Review Magazine