Kirjahaku

Continuing where he left off with A Spillage of Mercury, Neil Rollinson's eagerly awaited new collection delves again into the dark, moist, unexpected bag of human experience. Taking the themes of love, sex, and life's unpredictable mysteries and excitements, he scrapes away at the veneer of normality to reveal a world that is instantly stranger and more compelling than before.Rollinson revisits the erotic with his usual wit and bravado, in poems that are sometimes playful and sensitive, sometimes visceral and shocking. He explores scientific subjects through bedroom eyes, introducing the idea of entropy to the lovers' lexicon; he makes sport a backdrop for loneliness - his characters playing golf on the moon, taking the final penalty in the shoot-out, or wandering aimlessly and forever through the high grass of the village-cricket boundary. Diverse and provocative, vibrant and accessible, Spanish Fly is an unusually happy combination: a successful stimulant and a wholly satisfying performance.

With the frank, subversive, and very funny poems in his first two books, Neil Rollinson established himself as a deft cartographer of the sensual world. While a rich and tactile eroticism still courses through Demolition, there is a new seriousness here, as mortality starts to throw its long shadow. These poems occupy a more rueful, reflective space - provisional, mercurial and fragile - a darker place where disintegration and loss are the only certainties, and memory is the only solid ground. Central to this is the death of the father - whether the poet's own, or the lost fathers of Borges or Vallejo - and the theme is broadened through a number of moving examinations of the erosion of time and youth. Against this gathering darkness, Rollinson sets a spirited defence, blending the lyric and vernacular voice in a muscular celebration of food, sex, sport and the natural world that is unusually refreshing, and sophisticated enough to allow both humour and profundity.The poems in Demolition never give up hope; they exhibit a tenacious optimism - or at least a steely pragmatism - that says: we have what we are given, there is no alternative, and we all must find what joy we can in life, and in its living.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry PrizeLike Neil Rollinson’s earlier books, Talking Dead is a refreshment of the senses: lifting the lid on the human condition in a heartfelt celebration of the act of being, whether in moments of love or mortality, sex or feasting.In the central sequence of the book – a meditation on the space between life and death – the dead speak of their final earthly moments with a liberating sense of fascination, and a luminous awe. Elsewhere we enjoy al fresco sex, astronomy via many pints in the Cat and Fiddle, and the deliverance of an Indian monsoon after weeks of thirst and drought. In ‘Christmas in Andalucia’ two lovers Skype each other achingly across hundreds of miles – ‘I am full of loss and longing,’ the poet says, ‘the heart is hewn from elm and oak and mistletoe.’As provocative, sensual and subversive as ever, these poems seek and find the numinous in the everyday: some element of ritual or wonder that transforms experience. Although the spectre of darkness is never far away, it is the spirit of pleasure that endures, and we discover to our delight, as D. H. Lawrence did, that the Dionysian finally prevails over the Apollonian.

A gritty and vivid interrogation of one family's empire of violenceFrank Bridge turned his back on his family's gangland conflicts in Northumberland decades ago. He fell in love, went to university, and is now writing a book on the Spanish poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca. When his father, the violent patriarch, dies, he decides to face the past and returns to Spain to carry out his research, and perhaps reconcile with his erstwhile brother Gordon, who lives on absconded gang money in a villa on the Costas.However, whilst Frank has been changed by twenty five years apart, Gordon still holds on to the rage and terror of a life of crime. From the doomed coalfields of northeast England to the beaches of Spain, the two brothers fight with each other, and themselves, to overcome their family’s legacy.