Parables For The Pouring Rain by Paul Sutton

“I marvel at Paul Sutton’s unique ability to confront the demons of our time and to beat them at their own game – the game of words. His poetry is a subtle affront to the censorship around us. His speech is more than simply free.”

— Ewan Morrison

“There’s something in Sutton’s work which deepens from collection to collection. The comic and tragic timing sharpens to an even finer point, the defiant focus on harsh realities, squalor and gentrification, “middle-class desperation for authenticity.” His poems can be blisteringly and aptly scathing (to witness suffering and dilapidation and declare, “it taught me ‘art’.”) and thereby consoling (“Oh, my feelings are complex.”) It’s all the more impressive that this resolves into a thoroughly moving elegy for Sean McGrady, with all of the energy, caustic wit and humanity of the work it follows. Sutton’s poetry has never been comfortable or well-behaved – he writes specifically to disrupt that – and that’s why it’s urgent, and fierce, and nuanced, and it’s why we need it more than ever.”

—Luke Kennard

“The ship might be sinking but Paul Sutton has tied himself to the mast and his poems chart the descent as the whole caboodle wallows down. Sutton’s work is a sovereign antidote to the pointless mush of establishment-approved literature. He’s a poet in exile still living in the broken playground of contemporary England. His sharp humorous eye gives us a wasp’s eye view of our times, an angry wasp at the window that is. We have lost just about everything but at least we have these heroic poems.”

— Rod Madocks

Wetherspoons, Bracknell New Town, Cumberland sausages and pulled-pork pizzas, a motorway Ibis, mashed turnip, Homebase, Degrees in Social Policy, landfill, PC World, Guardian journalists, Ofsted inspections, Degrees in Leisure Studies, Slovakians, October rain, the politics of shame, drunken lullabies of English drinkers, council houses…. oh, and that Brexit thing. Paul Sutton’s poetry is the thinking man’s and (to be politically correct) woman’s (OK: person’s) TripAdvisor reviewing today’s Britain. After which he goes all lyrical and elegiacally personal to show that cutting open the country so we can have a wide-eyed look at the horror of it all isn’t the only thing he can do. And if that isn’t enough, there’s “Sherlock Holmes”. This is Sutton on tip-top indispensable form.

— Martin Stannard

Paul Sutton was born in London, 1964, but brought up in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire. He graduated from Jesus College, Oxford, worked in industry until 2004, then left to travel, and now teaches English at a secondary school. He finds this environment stimulating – the joys, rages and stresses are exactly the spurs needed for writing. And the insight gained is revealing; of how dull and pointless most ‘mainstream’ poetry seems, to those who don’t have to feign interest.

A related inspiration is the liberal intelligentsia’s stranglehold on poetry – the absurd perfection and self-appointed moral guardianship, of language and much else, that they seek. Poetically, this is manifested in the domination (particularly in Britain) of the low-voltage faux-modest lyrical anecdote.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-317-1

$16

Parables for the Pouring Ra… by BlazeVOX [books]