CRYSTAL SET DREAMS
Poems by Mike Harding

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Mike Harding’s first volume of poetry, Daddy Edgar’s Pools, was published after he had submitted the poems under a non-de-plume and had them accepted in their own right.

’. . . Harding’s sequence about life in the Yorkshire Dales . . . continually demonstrates how he knows his stuff. He exactly catches the coiled-up forces of natural energy.’
                                                   Neil Powell, TLS

Mike Harding was born into an Irish-Catholic family in Manchester in 1944. He is a poet, playwright, photographer, traveller and stand-up comedian. He has written several humorous books, a book of short stories, The Virgin of the Discos, and four travel books, one of which, Footloose in the Himalaya, his account of his travels in India and Nepal, was shortlisted for the prestigious Boardman Tasker Award for Mountaineering Literature. His last book of poetry for young people, Buns for the Elephants, was awarded the Signal Prize for Children’s Literature. He divides his time between a flat in a converted cotton warehouse in Manchester and an 18^th century farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales.

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Drunkard

Though I am poor, with you I hold
The star-spattered sky in my hands as they cup
The water of the cut beside the pub.
Though I was cold, bitten, gnawed by the night wind,
I now am warm and burning
With your brazen glow in my belly.
I have swallowed the sunset, engulfed a golden sea.
I, poor, dull fool, am possessed of wit, silvery
Words spill mackerel-shoaled from my lips.
My dull, plain face is dusted with the beauty
Of a lonely house reflected in a rippled pool.

I clutch the glass in my hand and taste
Today, knowing that tomorrow
Yesterday will lie on my tongue like moss
On a wall, weed on a weir:
And in my cold bare room a face will
Look in from the mirror of another room,
Wondering at the mystery of it all.

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CRYSTAL SET DREAMS
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: Not credited
Publication: WINTER 1997 (60 pages laminated paperback)