David Crystal was born in Prudhoe, Northumberland in 1963 and now lives and works in London. He has worked as literary editor of DOG magazine and his work featured in the Body & Soul exhibition at the ICA. He has had two previous collections from Two Rivers Press.
wrong horse home
£8 ISBN 978 1 904551 66 9
David Crystal's poems do what most contemporary poems don't – examine the lives of ordinary people who are not so ordinary after all. There's a surreal familiarity about much of his work. More often than not we find ourselves in the landscape of loss, as people and places fade out in some of the poet’s most accomplished work to date.
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'Like Ken Smith and Barry McSweeney, he writes like no one but himself and his tough-minded humanity underpins the poems as they follow a surreal path through the real world.'
Geoff Hattersley
The Outing
That Boxing Day morning we walked the Derby track
the toughest mile and a half in the world.
At Tattenham Corner we started to run,
frosty grass underfoot, an almost forty-five degree angle
not flat like you imagine on TV. My Dad cursed.
He never liked second place and sulked in the bar
afterwards over a long Bloody Mary.
Dad rings most days, giving a hole by hole account
of his golf game, played with men with lonely names
like Fat Terry and a guy simply referred to as The Blob.
The monologue lasts for ages, his voice almost a bark.
I wonder is he deaf? or perhaps going a little cuckoo?
Sometimes I hold the receiver flat to the bay glass window
perfect, par for the course these days, swaying on the
white laburnum, a pigeon. I like it best when it’s a jay.