International acclaim & Critical Commentary for Glimpses of Notes:

Award-winning creative-writer and Professor of Life Writing (Salford University UK), Ursula Hurley:

‘Glimpses of Notes’ is an exceptional achievement, born of a lifetime of full-blooded engagement with a highly individual ‘existence’ and how it can be experienced, understood, and recorded in ways that resonate generously with others. This hybrid work, part memoir, part poetic collage, and part visual text, invites readers into the material in multiple ways. This verse autobiography defies convention and, like its author, pushes at the boundaries of everything. In my twenty years of researching and teaching life writing, I have found that sustained works of autobiographical verse are scarce, and those done well are even rarer. Glimpses stands as a bold contribution, a landmark, comparable in many ways to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.

Spanning decades, recording one life as influenced (and influencing) history, Glimpses is an individual and cultural chronicle. It confronts life’s difficulties with honesty, humour and lyrical grace. The voice is simultaneously fiercely individual and deeply collective, echoing the lives of those who shaped the writer and the world that challenged him. The fragmented style, making full use of visual, typographical, and rhythmic resources, reflects the fractured nature of memory and the tangled path to healing.

Glimpses is a work that demands attention, rewards close reading, and deserves recognition among the most innovative autobiographical poetry of our time.

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Yemeni bilingual poet and writer,  Professor Anil K. Prasad, Al-Mergheb University: 

Alan Corkish is  a poet of immense intellect, originality and erudition and ‘Glimpses of Notes’ is a  uniquely brilliant synthesis of imagination, reason and orthographic exploitation which amalgamates into a visual lyricism. His rhythms and idioms are put into appropriate and sometimes shocking structural variations which accentuate the poetic potentialities of the English language. Alan Corkish knows his craft well and never indulges in sentimentality. His poetic ‘paintings’ of epic, span and depth, are enthralling. It is oddly not just an autobiography,  there are parts of all of us within these pages.  Glimpses  is everyman’s ‘record of that 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 down 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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Welsh poet, Idris Caffrey: 

I found the book impossible to put down... I have never read anything else quite like it. 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, inventive, humorous and yet critical and opinionated. It hooked me. 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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British author, editor (The Journal) and publisher (Original +), Sam Smith: 

These pages bite. Given the cast of characters, vernacular accurately rendered, those who formed Alan Corkish’s character are lyrically not that far removed from those in Dylan Thomas’ ‘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. Corkish 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 Emeritus of the Humanities and poet in residence at the University of Tampa, Florida, Duane Locke: 

‘Glimpses of Notes’ is a poetically meaningful referential song to a remarkable life. There is an immense amount 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/word shading, from blacks to greys that co-exist with varied fonts, white spaces, and an abundance of other material devices that indicate the uncertainty and/or ambiguity of the words. 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 and produces a poetically meaningful referential song of immense originality which stimulates both intellect and emotion. 'Glimpses of Notes' is much more than the sum of its parts, it is a symphony of a life lived to the full, a quite exceptional creation that challenges us all with a new way of seeing.

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American (Georgia) musician, composer and widely published poet, L. Ward Abel: 

Corkish is a brilliant conjurer of honesty and whimsy whose voice in this epic tempts us towards a threshold of self-discovery through which we accompany this totally original wordsmith 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, mental-illness and the accompanying demons, Corkish emerges as a working-class hero in this autobiography: stronger for the battle, a weary but eloquent visionary. ‘Glimpses of Notes’ is a truly major contribution to the poetic-world.

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American novelist, poet, editor (Möbius), Jean Hull Herman: 

Alan Corkish crosses the borders that define auditory and visual poetry in a unique and exceptional work which embodies totally new techniques in a revolutionary new poetic form. He offers options. He invites the reader to think at a different level. To view text differently. 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 is not in the ‘populist’ mode of the moment. I am 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 stimulating and illuminating. A totally new and exciting poetry, ‘Glimpses of Notes’ is a major innovative work of art.

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Argentinean poet, Compagnon de la Poésie, Luis Benitez: 

I should begin by saying that I want to have written this exceptional poem! 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, interjections and pauses. With this autobiographical poem, Corkish (a poet I have long admired for his highly original way of thinking) confirms not only his unique talent, but also his skill and mastery of technique, for to make poetry with his life, and to infuse life into every page of this long work is sheer artistry. ‘Glimpses of Notes’ is a remarkable achievement; it is a work to read and re-read... a work to sit on the shelves of every serious writer and the more I read it the more I like it! Truly, a masterpiece! As both a reader and a poet, I say: ‘I want to have lived this life, I want to have written this poem.’

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Neil Beardmore, poet, jazz musician and painter:

Glimpses of Notes is amazing —  a work of genius. A piece revolutionising, rewriting and rejuvenating and innovating — a new poetry. (I’m reminded of Lawrence, Eliot, W S Graham — The night fishing — Lorca, Dylan Thomas, Ginsberg and so on and so on — extended and renewed.) Simply the very very very best of the best!

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British poet, winner of both the Frost Award, and the Fante Award, Jim Bennett: 

In ‘Glimpses of Notes’ Alan Corkish takes his reader on a truly amazing rollercoaster journey through his life. There are elements here of magical realism, post modernism and linguistic innovation, all bound into a format that he calls ‘fragmented-text’. It is a format that creates flows and eddies in the language which draw the readers in and takes them to moments of quiet contemplation and reflection... then at the next second rushes them on through a bursting lyrical stream of language to a signal moment in his life. Alan has taken his life and examined it in this truly innovative way. He has presented an autobiography warts-and-all. Once you see the possibilities in this approach neither poetry nor autobiography may ever be the same again.

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British poet and novelist, Helen Kitson: 

‘Glimpses of Notes’ is an exceptionally fine achievement... it is an autobiography in ‘verse’, which might sound like a grim, solipsistic affair. It is to Alan Corkish’s credit that he has brought it off rather magnificently - with humour, originality and an awareness of the influence of history and the world around him. Indeed, the footnotes explaining significant world events provide a context and framework - footnotes can be irritating, but in ‘Glimpses’ they are often touching, they enrich the narrative… although at times I suspect they are not entirely serious. Excitingly ‘different’.

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American writer, journalist, poet, artist and editor (The Idea Museum), Lorette C. Luzajic: 

‘Glimpses of Notes’ is at turns violent, sad, erotic, triumphant, tragic, accusatory and comic… 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 extraordinary man observes everything; witches, aliens, political corruption, philosophy, serial-killers, nothing escapes Corkish’s intense scrutiny. In this (thankfully 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. It is worth repeating, it is at turns violent, sad, erotic, triumphant, tragic, accusatory and fun… ‘Glimpses of Notes’ recalls history as if it had a soul.

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British writer, editor and publisher (Bluechrome), Anthony Delgrado: 

...extraordinarily well written! …visually stimulating! …quite exceptional! …highly original! …Wow! ‘Glimpses of Notes’ is different to any other poetry and peculiar to this poet who, let’s be clear, thinks differently to ‘normal’ people... In ‘Glimpses of Notes’, Alan Corkish does, what he usually does in his poetry, he takes to different routes and follows some unlikely, overgrown, unexplored path... the poet is unlikely to become peturbed by the fact that other people may find it tricky to keep-up... for the path is very much his own and if you don’t like it, or you need a tarmac path with signposts, that is your problem. He doesn’t say it out-loud but the implication is that if you need a safe path, there are other paths-a-plenty; bye bye...

‘Glimpses of Notes’ is superbly well-written, one hundred percent original, carefully crafted, a more-than-interesting new idea and it comes from a slightly off-key angle that catches you in a blind spot before you notice it hurtling toward you. So beware, ‘Glimpses of Corkish’ can distort your wing mirrors, he/it may be ploughing-into you with a ‘wham’ that disturbs your complacent journey… before you even realise it.

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British writer and editor (Stride), Rupert Loydell: 

In ‘Glimpses of Notes’, Alan Corkish’s autobiographical sequence, the everyday mess of life is the essence. Language and lines tip this way and that in disingenuous chaos that is both bewildering and entrancing. This is real life, all the past remixed, remoulded, intriguingly realised. Corkish can at times be controversial and argumentative, but here he has stayed focussed and persistent; his best work to date.

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Emeritus Professor of Poetry (UK), Robert Sheppard: 

This work is an irritant to our complacency in which 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, and it also tests our tolerance. 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 shades. 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 and perhaps have your complacency disturbed.

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Steve Rushton poet and artist

From the personal to the political and back again, and  grippingly readable. I read Glimpses of Notes in one sitting while invigilating my latest exhibition and it kept me on the edge of my seat! A page-turner if ever there was one!

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Dr. 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 450 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 which is amplified in Glimpses of Notes.

258 pages. Perfect Bound. Cover price, just £12.00

GLIMPSES OF NOTES

just has to be on every poet and would-be poet's reading list.