Description
Steph Morris achieves a fine engagement between affection and refined outrage
across a sequence of poems that excited me
for their focus on the family and the nation.
A hugely enjoyable debut!
Daljit Nagra
Like the plants he nurtures as a gardener, Steph Morris’s poems are fed by a desire to believe the world is a benevolent place;
but his jaunty humour and O’Haraesque casualness can often mask his more serious concerns about the environment and our attitude towards it.
This is a playful and exuberant debut from a poet with a wonderfully original voice.
Tamar Yoseloff
These poems ask an ancient question: how should we live?
Their chief way of addressing it – a deft and knowledgeable moving to and fro between human lives and the lives of plants and animals – is in our times more than a strategy or conceit.
For unless we make such connections and see our interdependence, we shall perish, taking countless other species with us.
David Constantine
This book takes you on a temporal and psycho-geographical journey through both the urban and rural, shares some childhood lessons in toxic masculinity and its pitfalls, shines a light on small, devastating human cruelties and offers some hot tips on gardening.
Carefully positioned in the context of a planet in ecological and political crisis, love persistently comes through:
love of the labour in the garden, love of family, love of the natural world. In this poetic universe, voices of nature are as real as the voices of the human ones:
trains and roads are as much a part of the landscape as clematis, snail and fern.
Whether or not you’ve ever picked up a pair of secateurs or wielded a spade, as you dig into these poems you will be reminded of the interconnectedness of all things and will find yourself rooted in the good earth in all its fertile and dirty glory.
Jacqueline Saphra
About Steph Morris:
Steph Morris is an artist, gardener, writer and translator. He grew up in the midlands, lived in Berlin for many years and is now based in London. His poems have been published in various magazines and in anthologies including Diversifly, also from Fair Acre Press. In 2019 he won the Live Canon ‘Borough Prize’. His translations include novels by Martin Suter, the diaries of Brigitte Reimann, forthcoming from Seagull, several books about Pina Bausch and work for the Pina Bausch Foundation. His poetry translations have appeared in MPT and on no-mans-land.org, including work by Kurt Drawert and Tina Stroheker. He is currently translating Isa Aichinger’s poetry and dialogues. He graduated from the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry in 2017 as part of the inaugural cohort.
steph-morris.com @herr_morris on twitter
Here is the first poem of the pamphlet:
On arrival
I’ll rock up one day
to a do like this
dead, perfect
on-my-way-here
anecdote: car cut me up
on the Old Cunt Road,
knocked me sideways flat,
bike bashed bent,
worse than me, to see,
saved, sprayed white,
locked to railings where
friends then left flowers,
fluffy toys, and poems,
my family deciding
to scatter my ashes
round roses, white
tinged red, here
each year after,
crying at the good
the potash would do.
Unlike my poor bike,
I kept my shape.
Last thing I remember,
the driver defensive
as I gazed along ground
you shouldn’t lie on, grey,
grim, at my yellow bag,
reached a raw arm in
to note the numberplate,
inches from my face,
cross about the time
I’d waste in hospital,
worrying who would do
my work. Deciding
it was worse: who
would bin my things.
After that I couldn’t see,
or hear, a relief from
shouting and sirens,
and, well, here I am.
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