The poet Andrew Taylor sent me a copy
of In the Company of Ghosts: The Poetics of the Motorway, published by his own
imprint, erbecce-press, and edited by him, Alan Corkish and the artist Edward
Chell (who I've written about elsewhere on this blog). There are a couple of
things I've written in there: a piece about the M62 from the New Statesman and
some of my Motorway Twitter poems which I've posted before. But there is lots
of really good new stuff by other people: the architectural critic David
Lawrence on 'the nocturnal geography of the motorway service station'; the
Dickens scholar Malcolm Andrews on the French autoroute and the Picturesque;
and poems by Taylor
and others on the M58, the M62-M57 Interchange and other unlikely objects of
lyricism. I particularly liked the 'Motorway Prayer Poems' by the C of E vicar
and psychogeographer John Davies, now sadly (for us) relocated from Liverpool
to deepest Devon. Here is an extract from 'Prayer in the wind':
Bless all drivers of high-sided
vehicles,
Bless all seagulls blown off course,
Bless all shoppers whose carrier bags
are erratic sails in a bad storm.
Bless those who really are at sea, in
cavernous calamitous waves.
Amen to that. The book, I have just
discovered, was featured on Radio 4's Today programme a couple of weeks ago:
Posts
The Erbacce Press website seems wilfully unfriendly to anyone actually looking to buy one of their products, but it looks like In The Company Of Ghosts is available via this page: http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/in-the-company-of-ghosts/4564856279
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