'I don’t always need it
sometimes I don’t always want it
but as I step off the train
and onto the platform
the music in my ears
has stripped all the skin
from my bastard beer belly
and it has made me walk
with my back coherently
straight
into a night
so unafraid of the dark'
from 'Musical Interlude'
'First Guinness In A New City' is the debut collection of Olly J. Taylor, a poet who is as meandering and casual in subject as he is direct with his choice of language. The author's experiences around the towns and cities of the north of England are imagined through a polemical stream of consciousness. Whilst the poems retain a healthy cynicism, there is also an element of hope for the possibility of personal fulfilment as the collection progresses. These poems mark his reasons to stay as much as his reasons to leave.
Olly J. Taylor was born in 2001 and was raised in Darlington, in the North East. He is a Creative Writing MA Graduate from Durham University.
Cover photograph by Ian Robson.
KV7 (Second Edition)
ISBN 9781068520051
44 pp.
A6 pocket paperback.
Printed on fully recycled paper.
