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Gareth Jones
Gareth was born in London in 1978, growing up there and in Wigan, Lancashire. His work has been published in numerous small press magazines and broadcast on radio, and has received prizes in the 2005 Academi Cardiff Poetry International and 2006 National Poetry Competitions. He lives in London.
publications:
Observed with unflinching clarity and dark humour, Gareth Jones offers us a world of morning-afters, streakers at rugby matches and stubborn phantoms.
Catherine Smith
Unreel from weekend millionaires
Strung along the street one morning
like low-level bunting; a mystery
to passing dogs who nose along it:
a length of cassette tape looped and wound
across a maze of roads to the park –
a contour, an isobar, brought to life –
straight for a huddle of trees where it rides
wire-taut around the branches:
something unwelcome, something wrong –
a crime-scene cordon in a country field,
a deep, dark string of gut gone dry;
it rasps like an army of plastic bags
but cannot disclose the secrets it holds:
the dead notes of a discarded LP,
or a long-gone listened-to radio programme,
a declaration of love, a confession,
someone’s last words, the half-deranged sermon
that could have saved us all, or simply
the pure grey noise of tape-head static –
the silence of something about to be said