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RENEWING THE LIGHT
Poems by Colin Archer
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Colin Archer, who lives in Virginia Water, is a Creative Writing Tutor for Surrey Adult Education and Surrey University, working in Staines and Sunbury. He also runs Creative Writing projects throughout Surrey and beyond for various Arts organisations especially Artability South East. This organisation brings opportunities for people with disabilities, and older people, to work with professional writers and artists of all kinds. Colin has worked as Writer-in-Residence in hospices, and has undertaken projects in hospitals, day centres, community centres etc. throughout the Home Counties.
Renewing the Light is Colin Archer’s first full collection of poetry. Twelve of his poems, not included in the present collection, appeared in Peterloo Preview 3 (1993).
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Gibberish
Mocked by an idiotic name, Gibberish
thrived long before Babel and Bible,
is older even than Ursprache, remains
majestically free of dictionaries. It is
the sacred language of the profound;
the speech of orgasm, of babyish falterings,
of loosing everything loved and more, of
shock and meltdown; grumbling of the Spheres;
howl of the sheeted dead rising to Caesar;
unheroic last words; wails and Wakes; talk
of the Devil; speak of tongues and of angels,
the vernacular of our own beast-brain;
the rant of the Sphinx, all Dutch, double
Chinese, and Greek whispers, pure vocables
and raw syntax; tough twaddle ripened
into mystery; the lingua franca of Lear,
of hewgh and fitchew, squiny and falchion;
of lost words and of the nonce words
we don't yet know we knew. Gibberish
demands a hearing. I loosen my larynx
and launch from single words - lixish, say,
grinning at the camera, or gorunder shouted
at the overtaker - into a full length quest
for a squillet of wise fool's gold.
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RENEWING THE LIGHT
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: "Windows Open Simultaneously" (First Part, Third Motif)
1912, by Robert Delaunay.
©L & M Services B.V. Amsterdam 980707
Publication: SUMMER 1998 (71 pages laminated paperback)
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