Ralph Dartford – författare

Recovery Songs is a cycle of narrative poems that focuses on the fall and rise of the human condition. These are stories of love, abandonment, abuse, addiction, loss, and by the end, a redemption earned. Unflinching and funny at times, this collection takes its reader through a life lived in the margins, and asks: how do we recover when everything appears lost?

'We included everything we wanted to say without saying it.' Duke Ellington

Hidden Music is a collection of poems that listens and responds to Ralph Dartford's lifetime obsession with song, and which subsequently allows his singular poetic vision to take flight. From Nick Cave to Lee Morgan, and Ella Fitzgerald to Radiohead, these poems search and reveal the untold stories within a dyslexic and melodious imagination, and like the most intoxicating music, gifts ownership to both the listener and the reader.

‘Not far away, outside a lighted house.’

The final collection in Ralph Dartford's 'Recovery Trilogy' sees the poet meditating on the tragic death of his beloved brother, Joseph, and how he lived in the mythical house of England: a nation of waving flags seen through soft focus sunlight. Here are his people, their misfitting tales that scratch and count the bricks of a private island imprisoned within its own walls, rituals and loneliness.

Warm and lyrical, visceral in its fury, but finally resolute in its ceaseless quest for love and tenderness, this concluding collection dances the demand for better days – that we all must have the opportunity to recover and sing together. Whatever the cost to the crumbling mortar of old Albion.

"House Anthems is both an elegy to a beloved brother and a touching homage to the inevitability of time passing within our homes and towns. These poems are shot through with a pulse which serves to comfort in times of grief: ‘we will hear music that stitches our reasons to beat again’. A hugely insightful and thoughtful collection." Katy Mahon

"House Anthems feels like a soundtrack to winter, to grief and the memory of heat. Finished in the way the past is, but unfinished in the way that the past is always just out of reach." Louise Fazackerley