Through use of accessible and vivid imagery, infused with David’s knowledge of myth and folklore, and crafted with the eye of a playwright and storyteller, the poems in this first collection are brought to another level by experience of personal loss.

David Calcutt was born and lives in the West Midlands. He has written many plays for both theatre and radio and published several novels and stories for children, as well as four pamphlets of poetry. This is his first full collection. And is keenly awaited by his current fans.

SOME OF HIS PREVIOUS WORK:

Poetry: Outlaws (Iron Press), Road Kill and Through the Woods (Fair Acre Press), The Old Man in the House of Bone (V. Press).

Novels and Stories: Crowboy, Shadow Bringer, The Map of Marvels, Why the Sea is Salty, The Journey of Odysseus (Oxford University Press), Robin Hood (Barefoot Books).

Published plays include: Lady Macbeth, Salem, Beowulf, The Terrible Fate of Humpty Dumpty, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Dracula (Oxford University Press)

Broadcast plays include: Paper Doll, The Bogeyman, The Otherworld Child, The Daughter of the Sea, Walker in the Night, Lady of Flowers and Feathers, Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, The Last of the Mohicans, Fahrenheit 451, The Return of the Native (BBC). Theatre Productions include: Ruff Moey, The Ballad of Billy Earp (Theatre Foundry), The Map of Marvels (Pentabus), Assassin of the Sun (Tabard Theatre), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Prospero’s Island, The Mothers, The White Shining Land, The Ward, Descent, (Midland Actors Theatre), The Life and Times of the Tat Man, Winter Tales, The Darlaston Dog Fight (Regional Voice Theatre).

PREVIOUS REVIEWS:

On ‘Road Kill’

There is a constant celebration of the seasons and cycles of the life of the countryside. The holistic, biocentric vision widens in the later poems to embrace folklore and mythology. All this in a luminous accessible verse.

Keith Sagar - Biographer of Ted Hughes, author of Literature and the Crimes against Nature.

I am hugely impressed. By concentrating on the small things, really looking at them, Nadia Kingsley and David Calcutt have managed to articulate something enormous. There is something shamanic, redemptive even, about the progress of the poems into the woods.

Katrina Porteous - Poet. Historian. Broadcaster.

On ‘Through the Woods’

This is a deeply satisfying, layered work that will bear rereading.

Jan Fortune, Envoi magazine.

On ‘The Old Man in the House of Bone’

The Old Man in the House of Bone is a humane and tender account of an old man’s mental and physical decline into the final silence. David Calcutt’s imagery grows from the page and fixes itself inside the skull. He is a master magician, a seeker of darkness.

Helen Ivory - Poet. Visual Artist. Editor of Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Having been a nurse on psycho-geriatric wards everything here rang true, is the best description of the process of dementia I’ve come across.

Sam Smith - Poet. Author. Editor of The Journal.

This precise and striking series of poems is both consequential and sequential; each one building on the previous and the following like sediment, creating a brooding and disquieting atmosphere. Calcutt’s poetry is alert and surefooted - written with a humane touch, and always compelling.

Jane Commane - Poet. Editor/Director of Nine Arches Press.