Christmas Sale

As Christmas approaches, I’ve decided to do a special offer on my latest poetry collection, LifeTimes, which will be available for £5 (normal price £7) between now and the end of December. You can read a selection of poems from LifeTimes (and some more of my poems) here: https://www.tetaylor.co.uk/archive

My other collection, Sea Without a Shore, and my two novels, Zeus of Ithome and Revolution Day are all also available for £5 each. Or you can by any two for £9, any three for £13, or all four for £17 – plus £2.25 per book postage and packing, if you’d like to receive them by post. If you’d like any books, e-mail me on tim.e.taylor@talk21.com.

Review of LifeTimes by Chris Preddle:

“These are truthful, wise and moving poems about an ‘ordinary’ lifetime (as if any were such) made compelling by the poetry. Most poems are about childhood, early life, parenthood and family life, with some valedictory poems and elegies at the end. Tim’s approach is straightforward, without affectation or rhetoric, so that I feel with these feeling poems. Lines and phrases are felicitous and right, there are some strong and unusual metaphors, and Tim has a real gift for the last line of a poem. He has a good sense of form and often uses stanzas of free verse, with occasional traditional forms and rhyme. I liked especially ‘Candy Floss’, ‘To My Daughter’, ‘The Cowrie Shell’, ‘Still Waters?’ and ‘Christmas Card Friends’. And the opening and closing poems contain the whole beautifully, in a slim volume with a cover of nine photos of a continuing lifetime.”

Paperweight

Today I’m pleased to host a poem from Dennis Tomlinson’s latest collection, Ornaments:

Paperweight

A simple paperweight - blue and green
flowers refracted by the glass.

All that I have of my mother's sister,
her thatched cottage filled with such trinkets.

Musing, I see her face rise up,
smiling like Queen Elizabeth.

Ornaments contains a series of brief poems reflecting on household and garden ornaments and their deeper meaning. Dennis began it in the spring of 2020, when the national lockdown caused people to retreat into the domestic sphere.

You can buy it at the cover price of £12.50, either from the publisher’s website, www.paekakarikipress.com, or directly from the author at d.c.tomlinson@aol.co.uk.

DENNIS TOMLINSON lives in London. He worked for a while as a translator from the German and then as a postman but took early retirement in 2020. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines, in anthologies and on websites. His first poetry pamphlet, Sleepless Nights (Maverick Mustang Manuscripts), came out in 2019 and his second collection, Over the Road (Dempsey & Windle) in 2021. 

The Gift

Since it’s the time of year when we remember the victims of war (and are reminded daily of its horrors in news from Ukraine), I thought I’d share one of my occasional war poems today. This is an old one, from my first collection, Sea Without a Shore.

The Gift

He gave his life, they said
as if it were some little thing
he thought might be more use to someone else.

And true, there was a time
when, drunk on martial sentiments and songs,
and for some noble end, he would have given.
But not for fifty yards of mud
long stripped of all that’s beautiful or green.
Not even worms would think it worth their while.

For this, his life was swindled from him,
so he thought, as in his hole
he felt it drain away:
but in the end, when twenty thousand lives like his
were not enough to pay the mortgage on that land,
not even swindled, merely stolen.