POEMS
by Phil Malleson

Ruthlessly honest and self-critical, the poems of Phil Malleson are the chronicles of a highly sensitive and uncompromising individual for whom aloneness and poverty were preferable to collusion in a corrupt, money-and-power-obsessed culture bent on the destruction of itself and its habitat. Their vocabulary and idiom often appear rough-cut and produced off the cuff, yet closer examination shows a conscious and exceptionally widely-read mind at work. Malleson wrote elsewhere of the ‘hundreds of drafts’ many of his poems had to go through before he could let them be, and the sometimes (seemingly) waywardly stretched syntax seems to keep guard over a lyricism that is always trying to get through. All the poems in this book are taken from Phil Malleson’s sporadic correspondence with Peter Oram over the past thirty years.

ISBN 978 1 899530 28 1