NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
JAMES DAVIDSON: LITTERING
Driftwood Publications
5 Timms Lane
Formby
Liverpool
L37 7DW
UK
ISBN 1 904420 15 X
£4

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This page last updated: 11th December 2007.
JAMES DAVIDSON: LITTERING

Eighteen pleasant poems showing an inventiveness and quickness of thought and expression, the more effective probably in performance, with their twists and turns, echoes, lists and repetitions creating insistent rhythms. Here is an example from LITTER:

 
	already wasting—
	amassing fingerprints and smudges
	little wrinkles and tears
	you can feel the change
	the wanting to escape
	impatience for the aimless wind
	the wandering drift of rubbish
	the gathering at street corners
	the final mass of faceless mush
James Davidson certainly has a sense of natural rhythm, as in AUTUMNAL:
	poetry
	wot the fck
	poetry
	wot the fck
	i never
	sept wot at school
	and all that shit
	i forget
	wot the fck
	do i care
	yer jus live yer
	life least
	try to
As in VOCATION, a poem about being unemployed, he has a distinctive and expressive quirkiness of thought:
	You don't have a boss
	But you live
	With your parents instead
	And the daily reminders of
	How they work to keep you—
	Clippings from the jobs pages
	Turning up beside your cup of tea
	Or on the pillow in your bed
	So you come downstairs
	With newsprint on your face
He generally writes about common everyday things, love and girls, birthdays, work or the lack of it, writing poetry, and so on. Every now and then he does aim for a greater profundity, but the seriousness sometimes slips into sententiousness, as in THERE IS A KIND OF SPEAKING:
	And only in the dark
	Is there any ending
	In the earless shadow
	The aimless monologue
	Where all worlds vanish into emptiness
	Inadequate to express
	Their own purposes
But all in all, a promising debut.

reviewer: Alan Hardy.