Adam Crothers

 

 

Ulster Poet

 

Trainers aren’t walking boots; now they’re not nothing. Maybe you
should drive all night just to buy back my bluetoothed baby shoes.

If you’re able to believe a single air-dropped pamphlet
then – correct? – comes photos-food-speeches-photos-cèilidh-food.

The wisdom of Crow Jane. Hits recital umpteen; is like,
she’ll no longer shred for the part the star charts say she should.

God’s in his heaven, so I’ll stay in mine. Dirty looks cross
these bomb-blasted lawns, the fecked fence a cairn of naily wood.

Inconsistent gardener flaunts his allotted vices.
He needs to escape! Which gives him this day his daily bruise.

Here’s how constant disavowal sounds. Well I’ve caught some more
downtime on Beechlands, Queen’s Elms, Holyrood. Upscale weeds ooze.

Such is the room for testing your tongue on the vibing brick
that for Crumbthings licks truer than a soft-serve save me could.

 

 


Adam Crothers was born in Belfast in 1984, and works in a library in Cambridge. His first collection, Several Deer, was published by Carcanet in 2016, and won the 2017 Shine/Strong Poetry Award and the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. He has appeared in the anthologies New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015) and The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff, 2016), and in 2016 was selected as one of the Poetry Ireland Review ‘Rising Generation’ poets.


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