A Straight Up Giant

Serious, comic, brave, cowardly, engaged, disengaged, urgent, unurgent, chattering chiffchaff, talking horses, unpretentious, pretentious:Mark Waldron's expansive fifth collection encompasses it all. There are a series of fairytale poems, and others which give unfettered voice to the character of Marcie, a character who has appeared in Mark Waldron's previous books. But behind the humour and playfulness, there is always something deeply unmeant, meant. Readers of Mark Waldron's previous collections will find all of his trademark wit and imagination here, as well as new poetic territory as Waldron continues to develop his distinctive voice.

Table of Contents:
11 Panic Room 13 Hippopotami at the Water Hotel 16 Swapping Clothes with a Friend 18 How a Poem Works 19 (Implacable doom-trod sky notwithstanding 21 A Feather in My Cap 23 Tender is the born 25 A Trap or a Net eleven grim poems 29 Blossom 30 The Garrulous Horse 31 The Bitten Ball 33 A Goodly Fly 34 gone off 35 The Traumatised Fox 38 The Woodman Prince 40 Fungi 42 The Piece of String 46 Little Men 48 The Princess and the Pea 51 Is it Honey 53 Burn Down 55 Contingency 57 In the wayward place 60 When you were dead 63 Puppetry 66 The Trees 67 No kind of cow 69 Quids in 71 We listened to the cows 73 I adore 74 I miss I am not a bad bird 77 Marcie says 79 Marcie says 80 Marcie says 81 Marcie says 82 Marcie says 85 Bluebottle Modus Operandi 88 Cadavre Exquis 89 Turkey Shoot 91 All your life is out 93 Henry 95 A Poisonous Midnight 98 Hôtel des Champignons 104 Crocodeelio 106 I don’t know 108 Bacon and Egg

About the Author :
Mark Waldron was born in New York in 1960 and grew up in London. He works in advertising and lives in East London with his wife and son. He began writing poetry in his early 40s. He published two collections with Salt, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), which were followed by two from Bloodaxe, Meanwhile, Trees (2016) and Sweet, like Rinky-Dink (2019). His fifth collection, A Straight Up Giant, is published by Bloodaxe in 2023.

Review :
I get nervous for Mark Waldron's readers – I can hear them begin to laugh a little, becoming too comfortable too quickly, while reading a poem of his and I want to warn them. I want to yell at them to get out of the way, tell them that what's really happening is that they are about to get their hearts broken. Poor monkeys. Clearly, Waldron has enough wit and imagination to sink a battleship, but perhaps the most interesting thing about his work is the use to which he puts features widely disseminated in contemporary poetry: randomness, whimsy, play and inconsequence…. When Waldron exploits these traits and turns them inside out, he shows an impressive elegance and rhetorical power, sustained despite a blizzard of broken registers and bits of this and that. His work reveals an authority it might at first seem far from seeking. The outcome is poetry that might count for something. His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language…. And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book. He has since been publishing books steadily every few years and his latest, Sweet, Like Rinky-Dink, continues to develop his distinctive voice…. [an] accomplished and entertaining collection that showcases Waldron’s mercurial poetic voice.