Damian Furniss - Böcker

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, Waiting to take you away. Climb in the back with your head in the clouds, And you're gone. Lucy in the sky with diamonds...50 years ago The Beatles transformed the face of music and popular culture. In January 1963 their first single – 'Love Me Do' – was re-released and shot to number one, heralding the start of the Swinging Sixties, and Beatlemania. This book collects poems that respond both to the music and to the group's influence on the way we lived then, and the way we live now.Newspaper Taxis features a myriad of poets young and old: including Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Adrian Henry, Philip Larkin, Roddy Lumsden, Lachlan MacKinnon, Roger McGough, Sheenagh Pugh, Jeremy Reed and Carol Rumens. Together they bring new creative light to the story of the Fab Four, and their capacity to inspire new generations ever since.Phil Bowen has edited a previous Beatles anthology (Things We Said Today, 1995), and (with his current co-editors) The Captain's Tower, a poetry anthology celebrating Bob Dylan's 70th birthday (Seren, 2011). Damian Furniss' first collection, Chocolate Che, was published by Shearsman in 2010. David Woolley is a former director of the Dylan Thomas Festival.

The poems in "Chocolate Che" were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks. Damian Furniss works images into narratives that are both darkly humorous and strangely moving. Using forms as varied as their subjects, with characteristic verbal intensity and a probing wit, he returns to the fixations of his youth in wry but reflective maturity. Along the way, he encounters the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa; visits the houses of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, only to find no one's at home; and collects the stubs of cigars that might once have been smoked by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, but probably weren't.