Great News!
Signs is a collection of original poems by Suffolk poet George Wicker, available NOW in paperback, price £6.99 (P&P extra).
Order through your local bookstore (ISBN 978-1-84549-178-9), by post (ORDER FORM here) or online from arima publishing or Amazon.
Here are forty-two poems in a unique style: sometimes surreal; occasionally irreverent; always inventive. Universal themes of love, life and death pervade the book, but the overall feeling that emerges is one of optimism. The poet firmly believes in a life beyond the body, and that meaning can be found in the celebration of our everyday existence, as well as in the creative act itself.
Central to the book are the poems written during the long illness of the poet’s mother from Alzheimer’s. In this moving sequence, voices “sing to her softly/or shout, so that she/echoes their obscenity”, before the illness takes hold. At her funeral, in Dead Flowers, the poet accepts her death, but insists that he himself will stay, “for the loneliest, longest day.”
A balance is skillfully maintained throughout the book, so that, if the poem We Were Free has a hollow ring to it; “we fashioned society/we created liberty/we scorned death/we were free”, then a poem like Audience is filled with the almost mystical sense of something that exists beyond our immediate knowledge. In the end, however, the poet argues that, although we have the means to fulfil our potential, we are often, as in the poem Dunwich, merely “phantoms/ghosts, and elements of ruin”.
George Wicker counts among his influences Ted Hughes and Zbigniew Herbert. His wide reading and scientific education enables a vision of the world as potentially chaotic (Certain Artists) yet ultimately, in Speckled Universe, of incredible order."