- No School Tie
£8.99£7.49 inc. UK pp -
Release date: July 2011
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No School Tie
In this, his fourth collection, Peter Phillips looks both back, at his schooldays, and forward with the birth of twin grandchildren. He listens in on imaginary conversations and monologues, remembers poet Julia Casterton and ponders on love and its effects in poems that, like life itself, blend sadness and humour.
The book’s title, No School Tie, refers to the time in the 1960s when Peter Phillips was sent to boarding school in Sussex. It was a period when homesickness and sexual awakening fought with anxiety, antisemitism, cricket and new friendships.
Another group of poems celebrates the birth of twin grandchildren.
From TWINS
GENERATIONS
To my first wife
The clock in my head strikes
back to your death.
Our daughter is having twins.
Will you hear them cry?To my daughter
They must be having fun
in the bright cave
of your stomach.
You are all lit up.To my grandchildren
I can see you in that cramped space
looking out for each other,
feeling the certainty
of your mother’s heart.
Reviews
on No School Tie
Phillips is a poet whose humanity and good sense are consistently deployed without self-aggrandisement or undue flamboyance; a poet well worth reading.
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 71, September 2011
This is a gentle, sincere, humane collection… easy to read – as easy as flicking through a collection of family photographs … the detail is particular, precise and potent.
Helena Nelson, Ambit 206, October 2011
on Wide Skies, Salt and Best Bitter
…This joyous, enjoyable, unpretentious romp, where art conceals considerable art, is more serious than it looks.
Herbert Lomas, Ambit
…Perhaps we too often sniff suspiciously
at the light-hearted and sunny in poetry; perhaps we seldom meet it,
unalloyed by sentimentality or jokiness. Here we do.
Michael Standen, Other Poetry
on Looking For You
The book is a triumph of the comic (the word is used in no trivial sense) spirit… A moving collection.
Glyn Pursglove, Acumen
on Frayed At The Edges
Now that poetry is going back looking for the public it left behind, Peter Phillips should pick up support… This is a first collection of undoubted promise.
Sam Gardiner, Seam
Playwriting
Peter Phillips has written, with fellow-poet Ian Purser, two one-act stage plays, set in the world of writing, which can be performed independently or as a double bill, with virtually the same cast.A rehearsed reading of The Green Room took place in October 2010, as part of the Torbay Poetry Festival.
“To many people it was one of the highlights of the Festival”
Patricia Oxley, Torbay Poetry Festival Organiser
The Green Room (A comedy)
Long-standing animosities come to a dramatic head at a
literary festival in honour of a recently deceased novelist…
Stressed Ending: (A drama)
Takes place over two days at a creative writing weekend where the poetry tutor is on the verge of winning an important prize and has to face the consequences of his professional and personal past…
Biography
Peter Phillips is a London poet. His three previous collections, all published by Hearing Eye were
- Wide Skies, Salt and Best Bitter, 2005
- Looking For You, 2001
- Frayed At The Edges, (pamphlet), 1997