The Sparks (Tall-Lighthouse, November 2008)

The Sparks, Tall-Lighthouse, £4. ISBN 978-1-904551-56-0

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ERIC GREGORY AWARD 2009

In The Sparks, Ben Wilkinson meets a dark world with a light touch. These are poems of the city in the night and a young man's place at its heart. Even when the poems move out from an urban focus, it is to a rural world of missing walkers and lurking cars, a shifting pitch-black beach or a black-misted sea where trawlers roll like beasts. But the dark is lit by sparks of electricity, glowing cigarettes and a strange sun recalled from childhood. These are neat and clever poems.


Poems from this publication previously appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Magma, Other Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Frogmore Papers, The London Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement.


The Sparks is poetry responsive to the elemental layers that underscore the material sheen of our early twenty-first century. It is the work of a poet steeped in the masters, but not cowed by them. Its lines are stylish, fluent, its images incandescent. There is both achievement and promise here: achievement borne of a craft thoroughly learned; the promise that what Ben Wilkinson produces as he begins the difficult business of unlearning is worth the wait.

- Conor O'Callaghan

These are the words of a writer sure of his craft [...] Armitage may be standing pretty close to his elbow, and Eliot has whispered a line or two, but you feel this poet has taken what he wants from these. Now he's preparing to go beyond them, into his own territory. Wilkinson has the strength to dare, and if we feel some of these stretches are a little precocious, they're worth it for the jolts and surprises and shifts that force a reader to go back and re-read.

- Noel Williams, review in Now Then magazine

What strikes me most about Wilkinson's poems is their discursiveness, their willingness to extrapolate from the phenomena they record towards moral and philosophical conclusions. Such a method reminds me of the Romantics, and particularly of Wordsworth; but here Nature is replaced by the complicated, unsatisfactory, urban contemporary landscape.

- Tony Williams

Ordinary


On an evening like this – the two of us lolling about
     the flat
with windows opened wide to the breeze and
     summer’s heat –
I smile in the wake of everyday moments:
     Orhan Pamuk’s
Istanbul a still, open-winged bird in your hands,
     the hum of
Little Earthquakes budding away in the background.

If I were undecided, this is where I’d want to be:
     in the distance,
the rushlight of traffic carries across like the hush
     of the sea…
now the kitchen tap drips its steady beat, a tree’s
     branches shift
with the sudden wind. If there is something to say,
     let it happily
remain unsaid: let snow fall, snow fall and keep us
     here instead.

Available to buy @ tall-lighthouse press's website, here, from Sheffield Hallam University Blackwell's bookshop, or directly from me - just drop me an email if you're interested (listed on my profile page).