The political events of Summer 2003 is the setting for the main sequence of poems in "The Hutton Inquiry." The poems move quickly, as scraps of information, piecing together the picture of a summer gone wrong. The emphasis is on speed, association, guesswork -- creating a mosaic from the fragmentation of political divide and rule. The story of the nascent war in Iraq unfolds in "Progress Poems," a sequence that began as an indictment of false notions of progress, and turned into a melting-pot for harboured cynicisms: from Rupert Murdoch to Tony Blair. Jumbled in numbers from 1-2000, the poems move with the synchronicity and randomness of the internet. The book opens with "A Taste of Verdigris", a series of mostly present-tense, lived-in poems. These poems differ from so much contemporary poetry in that they account for the fabric of daily existence before it reaches the point of retelling through the techniques of story. They press with the immediacy of the moment. "The Smog: London Poems" is a sequence for anyone who has ever experienced the sensation of the outsider, newly arrived in London."The London Migration Sequence" accounts for the London rookie's attempts to make ends meet, and to begin to make sense of the metropolis. The final poems in the book are a series of love poems, lighter in touch, including a nod to the French Surrealists. These poems are the secure place from which the books broader experiments can take flight.

Table of Contents:

a taste of verdigris

a taste of verdigris

milton keynes

modern realist keep-fit poem

twilight fishing

fancy an indian

poems for lunch

michelangelo manufactured by the murdoch empire

pere lachaise cemetery

interpreting flying dreams

a piglet imperialism

cititrix

two for the zoo

flossing for fishhooks

sky tree wank star

post-its

network

running poet’s heart thinks in free verse when it rains

case study

garbagesleep

the other tonight

babalaas

dylan’s bust

the garden party

dance of the victorian remote control

progress poems

# 1,502: letter to rupert murdoch regarding his smile

# 601: punk

# 1,991: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in

# 11: wittgenstein

# 1,336: 1938

# 227: lunch-break powernap:

# 902: graduating

# 1,927: annual conference:

# 1,394: the allies

# 743: thatcher & the brighton bomb

# 1,492: tHE sTAND-dOWN cOMEDIAN:

# 185: search engines

# 838: the class divide

# 764: painting the sky:

#1,291: beyond iraq

# 800: ivor cutler

# 1,772: a drunk man compares teenage pregnancies to a horse chestnut

# 192: suburbs train

# 659: cleaning habits:

# 255: darwin

# 666: surprise visitations

# 592: theatre of war

# 1,906: bonnie & clyde

#374: revisonist theories

# 433: the jogger

# 171: mobile phone games in first class

# 1,333: defining genre:

# 555: george w. bush

# 302: indexing blighty

# 87: bakhtin’s smoking habits

# 21: the martyrs

# 1,803: the lads

# 457: a perfect imagist poem

# 409: on the night bus:

# 702: the union

# 959: television networks

#1,857: media coverage

# 1,687: backseat activism

# 328: management styles:

# 1,531: internet death of chris mccabe

#278: genetically modified

# 819: barflies

# 526: some propaganda

# 972: pre-reading reception:

# 189: vincent van gogh

# 1,111: ezra pound

# 911: self-referential poetics

# 1,174: industrial reminder

# 850: red label classification in the letter library

# 1,061: sunday morning

#133: the office

# 50: james joyce

# 471: a particularised history of cocaine

# 1,002: rome; a play in ten lines

# 299: thank you tony

# 1,463: michael jackson

# 986: winter

# 1,600: in england

# 701: maslow

# 1,094: billy the kid retires, marries & turns to poetry

# 1,744: the hippocritopotamus

# 842: wittgenstein 2

# 1,231: shopping

# 170: the divorce rate

# 1,192: osama bin laden

the smog: London poems

the london weather news

untitled

three london poems

zone

jogging in the country park

any normal day in dagenham

london migration sequence

The Hutton Inquiry

so every book is a car, then?

a new iraqi flag

a late arrival

crikey

high-risk sunday league strategy

some trinkets: for Sarah

some trinkets

a note for sarah

shortwood

slices

the girl who cried fox

a christmas poem

fairy tale: the wolf & the book

uttoxeter

delicious