Adrian Slatcher

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Biographical note:  Adrian Slatcher was born in Walsall in 1967 and grew up in Norton Canes, Staffordshire. He studied English in Lancaster and Creative Writing in Manchester where he currently lives. He works as a project manager primarily helping the arts to understand technology. He writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction and regularly blogs about literary matters at artoffiction.blogspot.com

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717996
ISBN:  9781844717996
Author:  Adrian Slatcher
Title:  Playing Solitaire for Money
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Aug-10
Extent:  48pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  3 mm
Weight:  72 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  From urban nature poems, to noir nightmares Adrian Slatcher’s collection provides a new take on our globalised experience, seeing us as small parts in “a colossal machine.” The poems range from the dark to the surreal to the amusing, and are deeply engaged with understanding our fast-moving information-rich world.

Main description:  “Playing Solitaire for Money” is a collection of lyric poems, which are contemporary in form and subject. It’s roughly split into three types of poems. The first third are poems about our globalised experience – seeing us as small parts in “a colossal machine”, bit part players in the complexities of modern society. The poems take our everyday experiences and distil them into somewhat surreal, but always truthful scenarios. The middle poems in the collection are more personal – observations on modern life, or ruminations on cinema or fiction. The last few poems are more playful – stepping out into the hidden landscapes on the edge of the city, or conjuring up scenes of middle-class absurdity. Yet there is nothing mundane in these poems. A cup of coffee in a high street chain is a chance to imagine the “impossible narratives” of the “coffee girl” serving the author; getting lost in a maze becomes a question about poetry’s use of metaphor; and, in the poem from which the title line comes, a person’s internal manias become a real life “monster”, that sits on it’s own, “playing solitaire for money.” These two dozen poems are never slight, and always repay re-reading, almost metaphysical in their warping of our recognisable realities.

Table of contents:
Playing Solitaire for Money
The Panic
My Monster
Drama
A Colossal Machine
Merit in Connection
Is it just me or is everything???
Frontier
The Death of the Grand Gesture
1983
Late Love
Bottle Sky
Cinema
The Maze
Coffee Girls
Love and Death in the American Novel
Clues
The Borrowers
Over and Back
Dog Clouds
A Problem with Genre
At the Vegan Cafe
Festival Season
Some Invented Evening
I, Conservationist

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Excerpt from book:  

Late Love

Have I ever wandered in the flower garden,
Absent from self-obsession,
Or, when drawn to a particular bud
Smelt its brief fragrance and lost myself?
And why, when transient beauty
Fades at speed, do I still glow
With the warm lie of that time???

Is it because I am a special case
Hotbed raised and partial to the sun?
Or would it be truer if I said:
We are all blessed with these hopes
And only weep when the memories turn
Into emblems of our casual regret.
On standing before the wind, a stem will break.

And when the past days merge into future nights
And chance uploads its lucky card—
When driven snow piles up against the solid door
And a pale flame marks our sorrow …
The long tracks in the snow we left behind
Are traceable beyond the edge of the wood.
A kiss, on lips still warm, redeems us still.