Parrish Lantern's Casebook

Love Poem.I want the next thing I write to have you in it, I always do. I want to write about your hair, or your hands, or the smile you have when you crack with emotion. But the next poem has a white wall in it, and a halogen lamp that’s so bright, it leaves ghost trails in the eyes, and is dangerously hot to touch.***********The next poem has got a beech wood in too, or rather the path that runs through the wood, and a meeting with a dog who smiles when you greet her. It will be a love poem, the next poem with you in. They always are love poems, even when they turn out to have bombs in them, or politics, or light switches.************************Full Blood is an anthology of poetry, previously published in an assortment of magazines, poetry journals & shared anthologies (Granta, The Guardian, Poetry Review, & The Rialto), before being collated in this work. The subject matter is as wide and as varied as life can be in our times and is encapsulated by the poem above, which even when it wants to discuss one subject it can’t help bringing in others. So the poetry runs through subjects such as the War (Afghanistan), Childhood, Racism, sex etc.In the official bumf for this collection it states that, “Full Blood is John Siddique's fourth full-length collection of poems for adults. Erotic, physical, completely open and fully engaged with the moral urgency of life, Siddique tackles his themes robustly and yet with great sensitivity, constantly defining and reimagining what it is to be a man in today's world, living fully in the moment”.All of which makes sense and is a fitting description of this book, this is muscular erotic poetry, the writing is beautiful as only someone who loves language - whatever it’s shape, whether fey or concrete, whether spiritual or something more bloodied, visceral can write. John Siddique has said that he regards his true countries of birth to be Literature & Language, this I can believe, but it isn’t what I want to say. What I want to say is that sometimes all those wonderful descriptions, all that verbosity etc., although by its very nature is wonderful, just gets in the way and all that really needs saying is… Look!http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/full-bloodjohn-siddique.html