Category: verse

Effigies

This is very much a work in progress: a single verse and a tune that may well change over time. The verse will almost certainly not be expanded, but it will probably constitute just one section of a larger piece with quite a lot of instrumental music, though the verse may be left a capella.

For a rather different approach to a similar visualisation, see Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb.

I’m not sure if it’s coincidental that while I was posting this LinkedIn suggested that I might be interested in a post as Obituaries Editor for a medical journal…

Effigies

Once more they lie together
Not an atom’s width apart
Where none disturb their slumber
For there is no beating heart

Backup:

Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette) – links

Suite in Four Flats

Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette) is a small poetry book originally published in the 1980s. None of the original copies are available.

It has been republished as an eBook on Lulu.com.

It’s also available for Kindle.

A load of other links can be found on Books2read.com. There’s a link to the print version here. So far it’s only available on Kindle due to its lack of length. Apparently size does matter. 😉

Book description.

This is the first in a series of books covering an awesome number of decades of verse by David Harley. Of course, you may consider that while the decade count is awesome, the content not so much. Oh well. Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette) was self-published in the 1980s. This second edition includes some re-engineered verse, a different cover graphic, updated explanatory notes, and a recent biography and bibliography. If nothing else, it provides some relief from the largely outdated security content that still comprises most of his published work, despite recent forays into musical and historical territory.

David Harley

Hands of the Craftsman links

Hands of the Craftsman is a song, an album and a book.

The Song

The song was written for the revue Nice…if you can get it (a revue about work) in the early 1980s. It was included with other songs and verse on the album Hands of the Craftsman, and that album was the basis for the book Hands of the Craftsman, which includes much material that wasn’t included on the original album

The Album

The song and (now expanded) album are available from Bandcamp (my music sales channel of choice). Updating via other channels is a little more complicated, so for the moment only the original album is available through other music retail/streaming services. I’ll probably have to release the expanded version as a separate album, which I can hopefully do in the near future.

The Book

The print edition is at present only available through Amazon, though this is intended to change.

The eBook is  currently available through Kindle, Nook, ScribD and Smashwords and some others: there are links to it on Books2read.com here, and there may be others on the same page in due course. The print edition is also linked there, and there may also be other links there eventually.

Book description

In the early 80s I contributed much of the songs and music (and some other bits and pieces) to a revue called Nice, if you can get it directed by Maggie Ford, which was centred on the world of work. Some of that material appeared more recently on the album Hands of the Craftsman. That album formed the basis of this book: however, it includes much supplementary material. This includes not only historical and anecdotal material, but material that wasn’t included in the revue, and other material that wasn’t originally intended for the revue, but fits the topic. Some of this material has never been published previously in any form.

David Harley

 

 

David Russell and Survivors’ Poetry

[Unfortunately, the image that was here seems to have got corrupted. As the event was some time ago, I haven’t replaced it. I will post other Survivors’ events as and when I hear about them, and hope whatever the problem was doesn’t recur.]

A very long time ago, I emerged blinking from a failed marriage and reconnected with the London folk scene, where I got to know (among many others) the astonishing poet and guitarist David Russell. Almost as long ago I did quite a few benefit gigs for the Survivors’ Poetry group,  allied with the Campaign Against Psychiatric Oppression, and contributed a couple of poems to two anthologies published by Survivors’ Press.

More recently, having dipped several toes into the Cornish poetry scene, I wondered what had happened to the group and to the Survivors’ Press. As far as I can tell, the Press isn’t doing anything these days.  Sadly, quite a few of the people I knew from that time (Frank Bangay, Razz, Peter Campbell…) have died, but the group is still putting on regular poetry events. In fact, there’s one tomorrow night (29th December 2022) on Zoom, featuring Wendy Young, Jackie Juno, and the same “all-round experimentalist” Dave Russell. That sounds well worth checking out anyway, but I’m rather pleased to have reconnected with Dave, who has sent me a couple of YouTube links that you may find interesting:

David Harley

Suite in Four Flats (and a Maisonette)

Just realized that I haven’t flagged my third book on Amazon (apart from the old security books), though there is a link to the eBook on Lulu in an earlier post.

Anyway, this is a short collection of verse from the 1980s, with some edits and additional commentary.

I’m afraid there’s likely to be some more recent verse in due course…

 

David Harley

The Goose and the Commons

This is based on an 18th century lyric protesting against the Inclosure Acts, usually called ‘The Goose And The Common’ or ‘They hang the man and flog the woman’. I put a tune to a version of that lyric some time ago, and it’s on my ‘Cold Iron‘ album. While the privatization of common and/or waste land is more or less a done deal, the underlying topic of those who govern doing so for their own benefit rather than that of the people still has a very contemporary resonance. The lyric below makes that link more explicit: I don’t know that the world needs it, but somehow it demanded to be written… I don’t know that I’ll perform it as a song, though, as I’m already performing the older version.

The law demands that we atone
When we sell things we do not own
Yet lets MPs and Lords so fine
To sell off what is yours and mine

The poor and stateless don’t escape
When they conspire the law to break
This must be so, but we all endure
Those who conspire to make the law

You and I do not escape the web
Of laws that profit from us, the plebs
But MPs and their cronies too
Use or ignore them as it suits

The law forbids both man and woman
To protest corruption in the Commons
And so we all will Justice lack
Till we can vote to take it back…

David Harley

Hosanna In Extremis

Something a little different from me on the Poetry Archive YouTube channel. Yes, it’s a poetry video.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) YouTube has done its favourite trick of keeping the volume as low as it can get away with, and I think I rushed it a bit. However, I suspect it will be on the forthcoming poetry and music project in some form.

Fortunately, there are plenty of videos on that channel worth listening to and not requiring tweaking of the volume control.

Meanwhile, here’s the poem.

Born in freefall, oppressed by gravity;
Cutting the harness and falling free
In the last days of the human race,
The last few metres of the Fall from Grace.
The gods look down and cannot change a thing:
No miracles, no more psalms to sing.
The rich men take the seats that they reserved;
The rest fight for a place on Dead Man’s Curve.
Somehow the human race is hanging on,
But humanity’s already dead and gone.

There’ll be no singing in the lifeboats,
Unless it’s in the Captain’s praise.
The countdown started long ago,
The last days of the human race,
But the chaos we’re creating cannot wipe
The smirk from the rich man’s face.

This is your last call:
The countdown to freefall.
The coming gale will shake the earth’s foundations,
And most of us will perish in the flood,
The poor and unseaworthy lie abandoned,
Buried somewhere deep within the mud.
Survival of the fattest; trickle-up economics;
Fact and fiction, fear and faith, despair and desire;
Politics and science, bigotry, morality:
We’re choking on the smoking and you can’t see the fire
.
Cold turkey voting still for Christmas
Season of myths and moral fruitlessness –
Break those habits, not the habitat,
Or you’ll take the whole world with you when you choke on the excess.
This is the very last last chance:
Let’s face down the muzak and dance.

David Harley