THE APPLE GHOST
Poems by John Glenday

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John Glenday was born in 1952 in Monifieth, Scotland. At different times he has been a student of English, a van driver, a printer’s devil and a compositor, but he now works as a psychiatric nurse in Dundee. Married with two sons, he co-edits the Blind Serpent Press with his wife, Penny.

The Apple Ghost, John Glenday’s first volume of poetry, reveals a preoccupation with communication and its ultimate failure in poems which explore the relationship between family and strangers, words and shadows, silence and light. His themes range from dreamlike retrospectives to a gentle, apocalyptic allegory of social and literary decline. The final, haunting sequence (From An Occupied Country) traces the collapse of an unnamed civilization – its petty tragedies and inevitable drift towards extinction.

‘. . . this good, grave, original voice’
Danny O’Rourke / Glasgow Herald

‘His is an intricate but moving verse which makes its appeal at various levels.’
Joseph Farrell / The Scotsman

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Typography

At the presses, they grumble constantly
about the quality of ink; although this makes
the books more difficult to burn.
No fresh types issue from the rook-filled

foundries. Old characters are wearing back
towards ancestral runes.
The newspapers no longer convey information,
but generate a speculative philosophy

based on rumour, and the size of type.
The poor malnourished printers suffer dreadfully
with hacks. They tell us how painful
they find it, touching those long words.

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THE APPLE GHOST
Price £4.95 per copy post free
Cover illustration: ‘The Apple Ghost’ by Malcolm Brown
Publication: APRIL 1989 (64 pages laminated paperback)