William Peskett
Poems
The first writing I ever took seriously was poetry. I began by sending batches of poems to the literary magazines and they started to be accepted for publication in about 1968. Two slim volumes of poetry followed. The first, The Nightowl's Dissection, was published in 1975. I was a schoolteacher at the time. For the next 30 years I wrote very few poems. I had to earn a living and writing poems isn't a good way to do this.
At the time The Nightowl's Dissection came out, I was in my last year at university, studying natural sciences. The book contains poems that I had been working on for some years and many possess a naivety which you might find refreshing. Quite a lot are about animals or other aspects of the natural world, reflecting my boyhood interest in nature and the zoology degree I was studying for. The collection won an Eric Gregory award in 1976.
Survivors appeared in 1980 and is still available as a Penguin paperback. It continues some of the themes of the first book, particularly the examination of nature, but introduces others, such as domesticity and, more obviously, survival. To me, the poems read now like an autobiography of that period of my life – the places we went around East Anglia, the things we saw. Quite a few are about things that happened at the school where I taught. As one of the poems says, we are not heroes, but survivors.
Selected Poems is really a 'best of' collection of poetry from the two published books, together with a few that came later.
"The most radical fusion of science and imagination – Peskett wields words like a delicate scalpel."
Edna Longley, Irish Times
THE SONNETS
What could be more unusual, and more alluring, than a collection of 38 sonnets about modern life in Thailand? The sonnet was devised in 13th-century Italy and revitalised in 16th-century England. In 21st-century Thailand it has finally come of age.
Most people think of the sonnet as a rather dry form of verse, but in fact the rhythm and rhyme it requires make it proceed at a rollicking pace and the discipline of getting the story across in only 14 lines makes for economy of expression.
If you want to know about making merit, ladyboys, elephants, bar ladies, Songkhran, the jungle and all the other things that go with living in one of the most fascinating countries in Asia, then try this book. Some of these sonnets will make you laugh; all will make you think.
In this collection, I contrast the ‘innocence’ of pre-industrial man, living in balance with nature, with the ‘experience’ of our modern condition. We have over-populated our little Earth, pushing other species to the margins or to extinction, misusing resources and polluting the planet with our waste. Without a radical change in direction, the future looks bleak for us all.
The inspiration comes from Songs of Innocence and Experience by poet and illustrator William Blake (1757-1827). Though Blake’s concept of ‘the Fall of Man’ was more spiritual than practical, in keeping with the perspective of his age, the contrast is not as stark as you might expect. Despite his visionary insights, Blake had no conception of how far we would fall 200 years after his death, taking mankind to the brink not only of spiritual, but existential, disaster.
This is a selection from previous two books, plus more recent poems. Humans are successful if we use criteria that other species – if they could talk – would respect, such as our vast populations and dominance over other forms of life. But in these very metrics is the start of our downfall. There are too many of us, taking too much, to be able to carry on indefinitely.
In microcosm, the same fate awaits blooms of algae, those ugly masses we see floating in lakes or ocean bays. These tiny plants multiply quickly to exploit an abundance of nutrients, depriving animals of oxygen and blocking light from other plants. When the bonanza is over, the algae die.
The flowering of our species is like an algal bloom, but we are not like algae. We can clearly see our impact on nature and have the means to arrest our demise, if only we had the will.
Go-Go Girls: a surprise for poetry lovers
Go-go girls are a bit of a Pattaya icon. They're the bar ladies who encourage you to buy drinks and subtly lighten your wallet, in the process of which you may fall ever-so-slightly in love with them. Or it could be a lot. A skilled go-go girl creates a fantasy that lasts. She convinces you that you're handsome, interesting, lovable and special. You never know, it could even be true. Limericks often celebrate old men with owls nesting in their beards. This makes the enterprise of using the medium to record the lives of Pattaya bar staff rather a risky one. This book is meant to be a sympathetic and humerous portrait of the profession. I'll let you decide whether it works.
"Hilarious – the author absolutely nails the bar-girl/customer relationship with this small but perfectly formed collection."
Matt Carrell, Goodreads