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GROWING PAINS
Poems by Eddie Wainwright
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Eddie Wainwright was Principal Lecturer in English in the Humanities Department of Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England) from 1975 to his retirement from full-time teaching in 1992. He spent the first 18 years of his life in a West Riding mining / woollen mill village then 4 years in the Intelligence Corps in England and Austria. After 5 years at Manchester University he embarked on his career of schoolmastering and college and university teaching. He has written articles on poetry and education, and reviews that have been published in Acumen, Envoi, The Guardian, The Observer, Outposts, Poetry Review and The Teacher. From 1991 he was the main review editor for Envoi poetry magazine edited by Roger Elkin. His poems have been published in many of the leading poetry magazines in the UK. In 1987 he won first prize in the Leek Arts Festival poetry competition adjudicated by U. A. Fanthorpe.
Growing Pains is Eddie Wainwright’s first full collection. It consists of his publishers’ selection from poems written over a period of the past 35 years ordered not chronologically by alphabetically by title, as the author wished “not least to avoid invidious comparisons, also to shock with the mild surprise of chance encounters.”
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Loki
I am the god of mischief, the Lord of Misrule,
the one who screws it up. Put your money on me.
I answer to the pseudonyms of Sod and Murphy. I bring
bad tidings and anti-climax, causing lovers to get cramp
at just the wrong second in just the wrong places.
I am the actor who corpses in a death scene,
I inspired Queen Victoria to fart
in that abrupt silence towards the end of the Hallelujah Chorus,
and at conventions of sexologists transpose
the consonants of Shere Hite. When I stand
on public platforms, my flies fly open,
my knickers fall off as I open bazaars.
I am the scourge of the electronic media. “Bollocks!”
I bellow into microphones believed to be switched off,
and once I announced in my most silvery tones,
”This is Victor Sylvester and his bathroom orchestra.”
I swivel the TV camera onto unwary nosepickers and bumscratchers
and poor buggers crawling under tables to fix wiring.
At the end of the day, I shall be there, grinning
and saying “I told you so,” and tripping you up
as you enter what you think are the pearly gates.
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GROWING PAINS
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover photograph: by Diana Wainwright
Publication: SPRING 1997 (71 pages laminated paperback)
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