Alan Corkish is a prolific and original writer of prose, plays, academia and, most of all, poetry... he also writes reviews and has edited over 300 books... to say his poetry is different is a colossal understatement; he experiments with images, words and the structure of poems in a manner that clearly reveals his love of words as visual representations. Below are three of his chap-books, all the chaps are 40 pages; Island Poems contains 35 poems that relate to his life on the Isle of Man where he was born in a one-up and one-down slum with neither water, indoor sanitation nor electricity. Bum Rap contains a vast mix of experimental poetry; 70 poems on 40 pages... 42 Liverpool Poems is just that; 42 poems set on 40 pages about Liverpool where he currently resides... the chaps are £5.00 each plus p/p (£3.50 in the UK)... A wonderful introduction to a refreshing and 100% original poet. To purchase click on the Buy now button above the cover of a chap-book to open a PayPal link.
Glimpses of Notes is DIFFERENT!
It is a HIGHLY acclaimed 25,000 word autobiographical poem which costs a small fortune (£25.00 and p/p on top of that which, to the USA for example, is another £25.00! -although we will heavily subsidise that-) BUT it has sold several hundred copies. Now in its third reprint the decision has been made to make this VERY important work available as a PDF so more people can access it.
So here is how it works; click on the black 'download' button below to download the PDF which is password protected. Then click the 'email for password' button and you'll be sent an invoice for just £5.00... once that is paid via PayPal, the password is sent to you. As said it's experimental and the hard-version of the book IS selling (in its third reprint) but the poet believes that more people should be reading it and feels that the price to have the hard-copy delivered is too steep for many.
WHY is it so expensive to purchase the hard-copy?
THIS is quite an extraordinary book, read the comments by other international poets and academics below and you will realise that Glimpses of Notes is something quite exceptional. It took the poet and academic Alan Corkish over 25 years to produce this 25,000+ word autobiographical poem in twelve books and it is produced in an A4, perfect-bound, hard-back edition of 178 pages, beautifully printed on heavy-paper with fully annotated notes and references.
ALL that needs to be said about this truly stunning work of art is stated in the critical commentary, some of which is set out herein beneath the cover image.
If you'd prefer to read the hard-copy just click on the cover to contact the author via email (he'll be happy to chat) and/or hit the 'Buy Now' button to purchase Glimpses of Notes, a book that any serious poet wishing to explore the very limits of the poets' art just HAS to have on their shelves. (NB; it is a hefty tome; as stated A4, hard-back, 178 pages so a contribution towards p/p of £8.00 is added for postage in the UK; all other destinations please check with the poet.)
BUT should you wish to see a truly magnificent and acclaimed work by Dr Corkish then treat yourself to a copy of Glimpses of Notes.
International acclaim & Critical Commentary for Glimpses of Notes:
Luis Benítez: (Argentinian poet and writer; Compagnon de la Poésie)
Set in the landscape of the new British poetry, this work startles the reader with its strong passion for words and its concise construction of verses and pauses. With this autobiographical poem, Corkish (a poet I have long admired) confirms not only his talent, but also his skill and mastery of technique for to make poetry with his life, and to infuse life into every verse of this long work is sheer artistry. A work to read and re-read and the more I read it the more I like it! Really, a masterpiece! As both a reader and a poet, I say: ‘I want to have lived this life, I want to have written this magnificent poem.’
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Dr. Anil K Prasad: (Indian poet; Head of English at Ibb University; Yemen)
Alan Corkish’s Glimpse of Notes is a brilliant synthesis of imagination, reason and orthographic exploitation which amalgamates into a unique lyricism. His rhythm and idiom is put into appropriate and sometimes shocking structural variations which accentuate the poetic potentialities of the English language. Corkish knows his craft well and never indulges in sentimentality. His poetic paintings of epic span and depth are enthralling. Glimpses is everyman’s ‘record of which I am.’ The semantic universe of the poem lies not only in the lines but also between the lines - ironically compressed, carefully carved, painted, and performed through words which dance and make the reader dream of a past when ‘steel fibres/ screaming of/gulls and winches/glimpses of notes/’ echo through the corridors of time. Superb creativity, a rhythmic creation of beauty through the use of technology which makes the words ‘speak’ to the reader. The poem urges the reader to go on and on reading, reflecting and re-evaluating the words which reverberate like the ripples created in the quiet space of unconsciousness.
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Professor Duane Locke: (Professor Emeritus & Poet in Residence; University of Tampa)
There is much to praise in Corkish’s extraordinary autobiographical poem but I will single out his inventive prosody; it is the prosody of typographical music. Especially notable is his letter shading, from subtle colours to pale greys that co-exist with varied fonts, white spaces, and an abundance of other devices. The pages not only excite with their visual impact, but his visual materiality becomes communicative, functions as a chorus to expand meaning beyond the literality of the words producing a poetically meaningful referential song.
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Professor Qingyun Wu: (California State University Los Angeles, USA)
Glimpses of Notes deserves the highest literary accolades. The poem’s dominant short-line format allows the eye to glide effortlessly across the page. Deliberate variations in fonts, spacing, and ink shades add layers of depth, intensity, fragmentation, and playfulness, preventing monotony throughout this extraordinarily long poem. Beyond its formal innovations, the poem possesses an unapologetically truthful voice. It weaves through the persona’s autobiography, shedding subversive critical light on major historical events. This authenticity resonates with readers, making the poem impactful. In an era where prose poetry often veers toward prose rather than true poetry, Glimpses of Notes remains steadfastly experimental. It is an immersive experience, a radical exploration, and a masterpiece of art.
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Idris Caffrey: (Welsh poet)
Few poets would be brave enough to attempt what Alan Corkish has done in Glimpses of Notes, an autobiography in a very different format to what readers will be used to. Touching, warm, intelligent, humorous and yet critical and opinionated. It hooked me completely. I found the book impossible to put down until I reached the end… and then I started to read it all over again.
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Jean Hull Herman: (USA based writer; editor of both Möbius and The Pen Woman)
Alan Corkish’s work embodies totally new techniques in a revolutionary new poetic form. He offers options. He crosses the borders that define auditory and visual poetry. The technology used to present information is never neutral: words leap as fast as thoughts. Alan’s stance seems to shout at you that we still need poetry, even if it isn’t in the ‘populist’ mode of the moment. I’m not anywhere near the margins of the page or the world. Everything old is new again - this ‘telling’ was good enough for the people in the beginning: how can any listener be surprised that hardwired auditory perception has survived? The tension between the language and the layout is refreshingly illuminating. A totally new and exciting poetry, a major innovative work of art.
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Helen Kitson: (UK based award-winning poet and short story writer)
An autobiography in verse might sound like a grim, solipsistic affair. It is to Alan Corkish’s credit that he has brought it off rather magnificently - with humour and an awareness of the world around him. Indeed, the footnotes explaining significant world events provide a context and framework - footnotes can be irritating, but in this poem they are surprisingly touching and enrich the narrative. A fine achievement.
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Lorette C. Luzajic: (Canadian artist and poet, creator of The Idea Factory)
If it happened, it happened to Alan Corkish. Beginning with his entrance into the world in a small fishing town at the same time as Hiroshima was being torn apart by an atomic bomb, the poet’s autobiographical recordings observe world historical events from one man’s view. And this man observes everything; witches, aliens, political corruption, philosophy, serial killers, nothing escapes Corkish’s intense scrutiny. In this unfinished symphony of a life, with recollections firmly planted in the backdrop of history, Corkish re-educates us in the events we have forgotten by weaving the news bulletins into the poetry of human emotions and conflicts. At turns violent, sad, erotic, triumphant, funny… Glimpses of Notes recalls history as if it had a soul.
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Sam Smith: (Novelist and poet; editor of The Journal)
Given the cast of characters, vernacular accurately rendered, those who formed Corkish’s character are lyrically not that far removed from those in Under Milkwood. A Milkwood here, however, with no romantic/macho illusions about the intake of alcohol; nor the perpetuation of respectable/acceptable politics. Quaint Glimpses aint. Consequences are explored and lived with, endured. These pages bite. He says that ‘a book that isn’t worth burning is not worth reading’. Go pore over Glimpses of Notes by candlelight in a puddle of petrol.
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Professor Robert Sheppard: (UK poet-critic; Professor at Edge Hill University)
There are two systems of meaning at play in Glimpses of Notes. There is the voice that button-holes us, telling us a life-story, like the Ancient Mariner, offering its opinions and pointing towards footnotes to historicize itself. It is a voice that is an irritant to our complacency. The other meaning is for our eyes. Beneath what we read there is a wild meaning, dwelling in the shapes, spacing and splicing of words and, of course, in their colours. Sometimes it counterpoints the life-story told here; sometimes it resists it with a precision of its own, a life of its own. I invite you to read this double-life.
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L. Ward Abel: (Georgian poet and musician)
The voice of Alan Corkish in this epic tempts us towards a threshold of self-discovery through which we accompany this brilliant conjurer of honesty and whimsy onward to his new world of strange words. His structural approach to poetry is unique but has the power of Joyce’s introspection. Through the anti-climax of Post War Britain, and despite poverty, illness and demons, Corkish emerges as a hero in this autobiography: stronger for the battle, a weary but eloquent dreamer. This is a truly important work.
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John Cornelius: (Hastings Independent review; 'Glimpses of brilliance…')
Alan Corkish’s full-length autobiography in verse, Glimpses of Notes, is something I’ve wanted to review, i.e. bring to the attention of a wider audience, for a long time if I could only find the appropriate platform, which turns out to be HIP literature. Getting on for 200 pages, it is utterly unique for its sheer uncompromising readability on the one hand with its grasp of integrated, meaningful and inventive typographic expression on the other. Geographically, the biographic elements drift from the Isle of Man to Israel and Europe then across the Atlantic to New York and back to Eire, London and Liverpool.
A tough early life which a lesser writer might have moulded into a commercial misery memoir is glimpsed through a prism which offers fractured insight into the life of a whaling-ship deck-hand, battles with alcoholism and authority, whether as a late-starter mature student – a fellow University class mate happened to be Carol Ann Duffy who, he claims, said she’d always remember him for his nose-picking habit – or as a disaffected school teacher (funny what sticks in your mind: my memory of former poet laureate Carol Ann is of her pulling pints in the bar of Peter Kavanagh’s pub The Grapes, in Liverpool 8, where Corkish also used to hang out).
Corkish sets out his stall in a deeply considered introductory manifesto of what he believes poetry to be and to be for. The poet recalls the time in his early teens on Mona’s Isle: having stolen a copy of Lord of the Flies the fates got their own back by almost drowning him in the Irish Sea, throwing him into a delirium of terror:
- ‘…before the green water rushed up and closed over my screams I saw a one-eyed fat boy and a pig’s head on a stick mocking…and a woman on the end of a rope with her tongue lolling…then wondering if this time (that’s the way with the kids you know) they’d let me drown (like brother Abbey who on a still March evening following a mackerel sky couldn’t swim either)…’
[I haven’t attempted to reproduce the descriptive concrete format or varied typesetting here. You’ll have to read the book! AND you MUST!]
Two other horrendous references to death stick in my mind: (a) The picture of young deckhands using the eyeball of a whale as a football, like the kickabout with chunks of ice on the Titanic and (b) the senseless murder of John Lennon. As a lonely disaffected school teacher Corkish heard the dreadful news; ‘saltwater’ welled in his eyes as the indifference of staff and pupils alike formed a mindless backdrop. This mirrors my own experience. As a reluctant and inept art teacher I began the first day of my secondary school teaching practice on 10th December 1980 – John Lennon’s death-day – and experienced (what turned out to be years of) total alienation as the only person who seemed to be moved by the event. I was also a bit of an anti-whaling campaigner, so the association is complete.
This quite extraordinary book includes extensive foot-notes to provide a current affairs background/timeline relating to the topics mentioned in the text. This is truly a voice from outside and a formidable tour de force; Glimpses of Notes yes… but also glimpses-of-brilliance; it's pricey, but worth every penny.
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