NASTY, BRITISH & SHORT
Poems by Ann Alexander

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Ann Alexander, who lives in Cornwall with her husband, worked as an advertising copywriter in London for many years, and lately taught advertising skills at Falmouth College of Arts.

Some comments on Ann Alexander’s first collection, Facing Demons:

‘Love Facing Demons. No, love is a weak word. Strongly respond.’
Fay Weldon

‘I have not enjoyed a poetic assembly so much for years . . . the alternation of dry comedy and black comment, all with the same spare mastery of the language, makes her stand out.’
Professor Charles Thomas

‘Facing Demons is a consistently impressive collection, always readable yet grappling with the intangible.’
Jeremy Page, Editor, The Frogmore Papers:

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In the wet-faced hours of the night

considering love, or the lack of it;
on-the-one-hand-this,
on-the-other-hand-that -

in these steep and solitary hours
come the raw questions.
And sorrow surfaces as tears,
and moonlight finds me, stretched
like some trussed Gulliver, among
the little, scampering, bossy needs of life:
the pinpricks of the new day’s coming cares.

And yet.
The day will dawn. A bird will sing.
A hundred different clichés spring to life.
Even in this January,
light, unstoppable, will show
the old camellia, up against the wall,
a shout of lipstick red.

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NASTY, BRITISH & SHORT
Price £7.95 per copy 
Cover illustration: Cur Fox c. 1790, by Thomas Bewick. Engraving courtesy of the Natural History Society of Northumbria.
Publication: SEPTEMBER 2007 (laminated paperback)