Chapbook RCP125
A6 56 Pages
40 Copies
£10
Tree Climbing - Mike Ferguson
Tree Climbing
The language which is all around us - on screen, on page and on the airways - provides the raw material from which Ferguson makes linguistic objects that are witty, surprising and sometimes profound. Seeming to be light and ephemeral, the pieces in Tree Climbing hold the world in their fragile and elegant structures, and in the words of one of the poems, ‘though I didn’t fully understand, I was enthralled.’
Alan Baker
In his new collection, Mike Ferguson samples matter dredged from the bot-and-cliche-riddled ocean of social media - the collective unconscious de nos jours - to trigger his own thoughts, feelings and memories, brilliantly editing and interweaving both in lyrics and short prose poems of concise and teasing brilliance. These are poems that are hilarious and disturbing, often at the same time, their 'cameo philosophisings' eschewing the 'anchoring' of homily or closure, committing themselves, and the reader who rides with them, to 'further deepenings', yet always with an unabashed ear for what in his earlier chapbook, Mountains, he calls the 'lovely, lyrical phrase'. If you 'like idioms / as mantras for / devotion', these poems are for you.
John Goodby