MARGINALIA
Poems by Wayne Burrows

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Wayne Burrows was born in Derbyshire, educated in Wales, and received an MA from Sheffield Hallam University in 1996, where he also taught at undergraduate level for three years. A book on the work of British artist Sarah Lucas, With Knobs On..., is available from PAVIC / Culture Matters, and he was a contributor to OUP's Good Fiction Guide (edited by Jane Rogers). He is currently working on a novel, Albany 6 set in the American music business of the 1960s and '70s and a 'documentary fiction' about money, Shrapnel. He is also a regular contributor to The Big Issue in the North and a freelance editor with The Literary Consultancy. He currently lives in East London. Marginalia is his first full collection of poetry.

'Wayne Burrows' darkly complex poems typically take the form of richly-realised meditations on physical decay and transformation... The power of the genuinely surreal comes together here with a different kind of haunting (Dutch) painterly perspective.'                                                                                     Times Literary Supplement

'Baroque manipulations of natural imagery set his work well apart from writing in the "green affirmative" mode...'
                                                   Poetry Review

'[He] repeatedly mixes biology and politics in a witch's brew to make the flesh creep ... his lines have confidence and power.'
                                                           Stand

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Promise

It is not real.
You are taking off,
button by button,
hook and eye
by hook and eye,
your clothes, decorum,
sense of shame,
becoming, as I am,
all surface, lust,
not yourself
yet wholly you.
And what if my stomach
does distend
like the staves
of a barrel
with broken hoops,
if my temples thin
and teeth decay
to an idiot's inflamed
deep-crimson gums?
Will we still -
when this happens
in years to come -
unplug our catheters
rise from chairs,
loosen flesh like raisin
soaked in bleach
and slowly, carefully
(in fear of our hearts)
see each other
as I see you now,
be not ourselves
yet wholly us, do this,
like this? Promise,
love, you'll answer yes.

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MARGINALIA
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: by the author.
Publication: SPRING 2001 (66 pages laminated paperback)