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last update:

18th Jan23

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poetry favourites:
Acumen
Hearing Eye
Torriano Meeting House
Ward Wood Publishing

 

 

“Centenary Verse for the Suburb” –
Interview

 

and shop elsewhere…

collections –
“Saying It with Flowers”,
“Oscar and I – confessions of a minor poet”
and
“No School Tie”,
Ward Wood Publishing;

  illustrated pamphlet –
“Four Poems from Saying It with Flowers”,
Hearing Eye;
  and more from Hearing Eye:
“Looking for You”,
“Wide Skies, Salt and Best Bitter”
and
“Frayed at the Edges”

 

 

this poet is taking part in the poetry pRO project
this poet is taking part in the poetry tREnD project

 

The Return of George Meadows…
Are you an organiser? Drama / Literature / Poetry festival?
If yes, then please see
Peter Phillips plays.
 
 

Peter’s latest full collection, Saying it With Flowers, is published by Ward Wood Publishing (2022). In this, he embraces themes from the serious and thoughtful to the humorous and elegiac. He imagines the strange lives of flowers, their human dimensions, and his connections with them. Among the many floral voices explored, a Buttercup from the flower meadow is a wide-boy tax evader, Ukraine Sunflowers are crushed with grief, and a Hibiscus becomes sexually aroused. He similarly writes about birds, animals, his natural and human worlds, ending with a series of climate change poems and an essay titled “Inspiration, or where I get my ideas from”.
 
In a comprehensive review from London Grip Thomas Ovans writes: “In this collection Phillips has addressed serious issues – first on the small scale of the flowerbed and hedgerow and eventually from a world-wide viewpoint. It is rather a remarkable achievement.” Read the full review. Also, Kathryn Southworth writes for Sofia: “Like Betjeman, Phillips’s voice is light, sometimes old-school and with emotional depths concealed in understatement. As he says (in an essay included) the poems come from his ‘being receptive, patient and experienced enough to know which random thoughts and instincts can best be developed in a truthful way’. He accomplishes this with scrupulous honesty which steers clear of the exhibitionist and confessional and which is touch-perfect.”. This review first published in Sofia, Issue 145, Being Human, Sep 22. Read full review. Link to Issue 145.
 
In Frogmore Papers, Autumn 2022, Jeremy Page says of the collection “There is a gloriously surreal quality to many of the poems … In some, he inhabits the flowers … whether gloomy snowdrops, vexing bindweed or sinister Knotweed. … There are deeply moving poems in memory of Linda Phillips … in its third [section], Climate Watch, the poet’s admirable lighness of touch serves only to underline the seriousness of the subject matter – ironically, perhaps, acheiving a quality best described as chilling.”
 
A selection of these poems were published by Hearing Eye in September 2016, in a small pamphlet with linocuts by the print maker, Emily Johns, with the title Four Poems From Saying It With Flowers, which was well-received.
 
In an essay on the pamphlet in the London Grip, Joan Michelson commented: “With his low-keyed, understated but surprising manner, his subtle manipulation of the spoken unobtrusive image and spare narrative, Peter Phillips buries bullets (if not land mines). They lie in the text like his snowdrops who didn’t see daylight for years and like Glück’s Wild Iris who returns from oblivion to find a voice. Look out for FLOWERS and for Saying It With…read the essay at London Grip and also in Acumen 87, January 2017.
 
The poems, in settings of fear and danger, inspired the composer David Loxley-Blount’s composition of Duoset, four pieces for organ and solo instruments. The first performances took place at St Lawrence Jewry, Guildhall Yard, in the City of London as part of a series of free lunchtime concerts on four Tuesdays in October 2016.
 
Peter’s pamphlet collection, Frayed at the Edges, was published by Hearing Eye in 1997. His first full collection, Looking for You, was published in 2001, followed by Wide Skies, Salt and Best Bitter in 2005 (both also from Hearing Eye). In 2011 No School Tie was published by Ward Wood Publishing, followed by Oscar and I, also from Ward Wood Publishing, in April 2013.
 
Reviews and comments on Saying It With Flowers and on Four Poems From Saying It With Flowers:
 

Peter Phillips has written around thirty poems centred on flowers for his new collection. In any set of work, Red Carnations will stand out for the simplicity of its expression and the depth of meaning behind it. It’s a poem the reader can return to repeatedly and find some extra layer each time.

 

Alison Chisolm, Poetry Workshop article in Writing Magazine, July 2015.

 

In Peter Phillips’ expert hands, flowers and plants are not the traditional, passive/visual conveyers of messages [but] become proactive anthropomorphic messengers themselves. It is the flowers that do the saying … Snowdrops – summing up the traumatic effects suffered by ‘inconsequential’ innocent bystanders, witnessing brutality throughout the ages, “they hadn’t come for us but it was a bloodbath, we were part of it.” These plants are the traditional heralds of spring, delicate and unsullied, so Phillips’ contrast with the imagined sight and sound of hooves ripping the earth, is all the more powerful. … Who can help but smile, as the poet’s Hollyhocks are compared to skiny schoolgirls, boasting [about] “raunchy sex / they had with the bad boys … except of course, they didn’t”. … Saying it with Flowers is a worthwhile anthology of accessible verse. The poet expresses considerable sensitivity, yet manages to reflect the everyday experiences of the ordinary in a creative and imaginative way.

 

Suburb News, June 2023.

 

Poetry Pamphlets are not unusual but it is exceptional to come across one with just four poems. Peter Phillips’s pamphlet is printed on cream coloured paper and illustrated with black and red linocuts by Emily Johns. His poems – Snowdrops, Ukraine Sunflowers, Knotweed and Tulips – juxtapose the innocence of flowers with the violence of our human world. Snowdrops features “a blood bath” imagined in England: “in the east – / Walsingham, Framlingham, swathes of us were // wiped out…:” In Tulips, the flowers resemble Nazi Stormtroopers: “Their black boots marched, // iron crosses glittered on their tunics.” This pamphlet is a small objet d’art, its metaphors are reminiscent of Jon Silkin’s Flower Poems (1965).

 

Peter Lawson, Jewish Chronicle, 26th May 2017.

 

In Oscar and I Peter departs from his usual voice and introduces the fictional poet George Meadows. The poems chronicle George’s ups and downs as he blunders through his sometimes amusing, sad and eccentric life, where marriage, romance and friendship collide with poetry, his beloved dog Oscar and, of course, wine.
 

Reviews and comments on Oscar and I:
 

Oscar and I, Confessions of a Minor Poet, is the latest collection from Peter Phillips, a London-based poet whose previous work has been distinguished by its lyricism and warmth. Understated, yet frequently moving, Phillips’s poems are also on occasion very funny. In this, his fifth book of poems, he focuses his attention upon George Meadows whose precarious existence as a full-time poet is explored in a series of brief scenes and dialogues that highlight Phillips’s timing and deadpan humour. In ‘Frank Introduces George’ we get an indication of George’s place in the current pecking order:
 
                      George is often placed or shortlisted – the National,
                      T. S. Eliot, Costa – but hasn’t won a big one, always
 
                      simmers, just below brewing point. He feels poetry
                      shouldn’t be elevated too high. It’s the only thing
 
                      he never worries about, is still a self-confessed
                      half empty-man, can down a pint in one flourish
 
                      but prefers to be polite and do it in two…
 
… Here is George’s final comment as he hovers above the congregation at his own funeral:
 
                                                                          Well, it’s nearly over.
                      Poetry has been fun, but as Frank said,
                      I never won a big one. Do I care? I bloody well do.

 

David Cooke, The London Magazine, Summer 2014

 

… the collection is designed to be read through, as one might read a longer biography… It’ s as though Oscar and I were a drama, and I was being sucked in by the characters and storylines…

 

Barbara Smith, Elsewhere website

 

… this delightful collection is made stronger by elements of light and shade … I shall not give away … the plot except to say that we do, in the end, get a sample of George’s own poetry. It proves to be rather good.

 

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, London Grip Spring 2013

 

These are beautifully crafted poems, spare, precise and poignant. They are also hilariously funny…

 

Peter Stewart, The Frogmore Papers, Issue 82, Autumn 2013