Nigel Pantling – författare

Nigel Pantling was a soldier in Northern Ireland during the early years of ‘The Troubles’, private secretary to Ministers in the Home Office during the most turbulent year of the Thatcher Government, and a merchant banker in the 90’s when privatisations and mergers and acquisitions were rampant. This collection of poetry draws on the danger, the absurdity and the human frailty that he has seen at first hand and is an insightful and unique look at a turbulent time in our recent history.

After the BlastNumber 10 calls at three: by five I’m in Brighton.It’s still dark then, and as I approach the GrandI pick past bricks, door panels, window frames,railings from balconies impaled in the tarmac.

Arc lights pick out the gap in the white façade.Behind a shimmering mist of dust, the roomsare open-ended boxes of shattered furniture,blue lampshades swinging in the breeze.

The Front is rowdy with sirens and generators,whirr and whine of platforms and ladders,rattle of chainsaws and clatter of masonry.Early morning calls ring by empty beds.

The Party waits, like families at a pit-head,cheering at news of someone alive,groaning at a body on a stretcher.Warnings about follow-up bombs go ignored.

Later, in a suit bought unseen from M&S,my Minister will speak in solidarity with his leader.For now, he and I are silent in the cloaking dustwondering how long all this will take to settle.

In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.

Hip Hind Hook catches the strange unsettling tension of the Cold War, and the idiosyncrasies of regimental life at the eastern border of democracy. Like Nigel Pantling’s previous collection Kingdom Power Glory, this pamphlet draws on the danger, the absurdity and the human frailty that he has seen at first hand.