Bike, Rain

A snowed-in Saturday gave me the chance to catch up with Cliff Yates’ new pamphlet Bike, Rain. Well worth a fiver from Knivesforksandspoonspress. Cliff is in fine and often surreal voice -especially when he’s writing about language and the confusion of travelling across linguistic borders, of being elsewhere. In ‘The Chinese Girls Played Cards’ the sky ‘was Swiss German, then French’. While in ‘Worb Dorf’ a man mends a heater ‘whistling in two languages’. The collection ends memorably with ‘Shakespeare and Company’. This poem, written in just one sentence, is packed with Parisian life  – but you should really read it for yourself.