Frank Freeman’s Dancing School: (Salt Modern Poets)

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

About the Author :
Cliff Yates was born in Birmingham in 1952. He won both the Aldeburgh first collection prize and the Poetry Business book & pamphlet competition for Henry’s Clock (Smith/Doorstop). During his time as Poetry Society poet-in- residence he wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School. He teaches at Maharishi School, where his students are renowned for winning poetry competitions, and runs courses and workshops in Britain and abroad. He received a 2003 Arts Council England Writer’s Award.

Review :
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 "