Peter Daniels at Mulfran Press
News: Events in 2012
Peter Daniels will be reading at:
The Stoke Newington Literary Festival on Sunday 3 June at 2.00 p.m., at the Mascara Bar, 72 Stamford Hill, N16 6XS, with Fran Isherwood, Katy Evans-Bush and possibly other local poets.
Fourth Friday with Leah Fritz and Liz Simcock (music) at Poetry Cafe, 22 Betterton St, London WC2H 9BX on Friday 22 June, 8.00 p.m. £6 / £5
Poetry in the House at Lauderdale House, Waterlow Park, Highgate Hill, London N6 5HG: Thursday 9 August 8.00 p.m., probably £5/£3. Reading with 3 other poets, including Robert Stein.
And you can check Peter's own web site (see below) for his latest news.
News: Counting Eggs launched in London
Peter launched his book at a private party in the RADA Theatre Foyer Bar on 27 April 2007. Mulfran Press thanks Peter for a most enjoyable evening, and looks forward to a number of public events over the coming months where Peter will read from Counting Eggs.
Praise for Counting Eggs
“Daniel’s poems have warmth, wit and energy, as well as a beautifully-crafted elegance. Re-reading them is a pleasure." Kim Morrissey, Londongrip
"Brilliance is much in evidence in Peter Daniels' first full-length collection. The poems have a subtle flavour all of their own, a sense of 'brave new world', as well as of 'fin de siecle'. They're myth-making, risque, unforcedly stylish and with a delicate spiritual sense. Several of them, including 'Shoreditch Orchid' and 'The Pump,' are an absolute triumph.” Moniza Alvi
“'The stripy shirt today. It chooses my mood. I suit it.' — Peter Daniels writes poems that shift perspectives, sometimes so deftly that you scarcely spot it being done – that is, until you notice that city landscapes have come alive with unsettling details round the edges; the everyday is subject to small seismic jolts of time and scale. Not that these poems are unnerved by the experience; they may rarely feel quite at home in this world, but they inhabit it with appetite.” Philip Gross
"Peter Daniels’s poems are those of a natural story-teller with a gift for creating off-beat characters and playful, unpredictable narratives. His eye for the absurdity of every-day life is sharp but gentle, his tone light but authoritative. Daniels never preaches or pontificates, but, in their indirect and humorous way, his poems seek answers to the bigger questions about how we should live." Carol Rumens
About Peter Daniels and contact information
Peter Daniels has taken a long and circuitous journey towards this first collection. On the way, he has won several competitions including the Arvon, TLS and Ledbury, as well as twice being a winner in the Poetry Business pamphlet competition.
He edited two anthologies for the Oscars Press, and was listings editor of Poetry London from 1994 to 2001.
After a break from poetry for a few years while working in a busy publishing job, he returned to it through translation, and during a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2009 he began his translations from the Russian of Vladislav Khodasevich, which are due to be published by Angel Books in 2013.
Peter has recently been a writer in residence at the London Metropolitan Archives.
You can contact Peter through his website, where you will also find more information about his work, events and other publications.
Photo courtesy of Martin Figura, who retains copyright.
Counting Eggs by Peter Daniels
Incredibly, Counting Eggs is Peter Daniels' first full collection. The many readers of his earlier pamphlets and individual prize-winning poems can now enjoy a bigger helping of his fine work.
Counting Eggs, Peter Daniels
[I-XII prelims], 63 pages, £9.00, ISBN 9781907327155
[also available from Blackwell Online, other online bookshops, his own web site and from bookshops]
St Katherine's Dock
In clear brown water you can make out fish
clustering in groups, four or five abreast.
A sky full of helicopters, and behing them
airliners, they bring importance, trade, prosperity.
Sacks and planks on the wharfside, loaded
and unloaded. Smoke and tar flattening the breeze.
The docks refurbished with cafés and shops:
cocktail dresses, flowers, marzipan, porcelain.
Three hundred yards from here my great grandmother
lived in a tenement a step from the poorhouse.
Rusty freighters from the Baltic or the Black Sea;
businessmen for lunch, from Paris and Brussels.
Refugees from pogroms, eight to a room.
Little black fishes gathering round the piers.
About 'St Katherine's Dock', Peter says:
St Katherine’s Dock is near where my great grandmother lived, though I haven’t done the research about where she actually was, despite spending some time at the London Metropolitan Archives lately. The story is that she was unable to cope and her children were sent to the Jewish orphanage in Norwood, but my grandmother (who was something like 10 at the time) was so incensed she led her younger brothers across south London back to Whitechapel – but I’ll write about that when I’ve pinned down the facts a bit. I’m happy to be imaginative about history, but once I have any facts I want to be faithful to them.