HODGE

Poems by Oliver Reynolds
23rd October 2010, £7.99 paperback
Bookshops: 33% discount, sale or return

Available from:
Areté
8 New College Lane
Oxford OX1 3BN

Hodge – a countryman, a rustic, a generic nobody, what Dr Johnson called his cat. Arthur Miller’s salesman, Willie Loman, is Hodge on the road: ‘His name was never in the paper… but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.’

For the TLS, Oliver Reynolds’s previous book, Almost, was ‘as good a volume as any of the 1990s’. In Hodge, he finds a dry-eyed pathos in life on the periphery: the little people, the hands, the staff and staffage. Attention is paid.

Here are the pyramid-builders, a Cardiff swimming-pool attendant, the ushers of the Royal Opera House and the caretaker who speaks for them all (even, perhaps, for the reader): ‘We have lives of our own, but not just yet.’

For any further information please contact Claire Lowdon on 01865 289193, or email aretebooks@gmail.com

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ISBN: 978-0-9562739-3-2

PRESS RELEASE

‘A tang of existential regret redolent of Derek Mahon… a vein of caustic sexual satire… For those in search of an alternative to the familiar star turns of British poetry today, the alternative may be closer than we imagine. Hodge is an enjoyable, witty and weighty collection, and should direct a spotlight or two back on its talented author.’
– The Guardian