After Hours explores mortality and transience in the lives of Irish migrants that settled in England in the first half of the 20th century, and the generations that followed them. At the heart of this collection is an elegiac sequence of poems in memory of David Cooke’s father-in-law, a larger than life Irishman who met illness and death with good-humoured resilience.
After Hours
Poetry by David Cooke
PB: 203×127mm. 92pp. April 2017.
ISBN: 978-0-9957381-0-2
Publisher: Cultured Llama.After Hours
Poetry by David Cooke
PB: 203×127mm. 92pp. April 2017.
ISBN: 978-0-9957381-0-2
Price: £10.00
David Cooke was born in the UK in 1953 to a family that comes from the West of Ireland. He won a Gregory Award in 1977, while still an undergraduate at Nottingham University. After publishing his first full poetry collection in 1984, he then wrote no poetry for two decades, during which time he was Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school in Cleethorpes. Subsequently, he earned his living as an online bookseller, but is now happily retired. He is married with four grown-up children.
After Hours on Cultured Llama web site (external link)
Praise for David Cooke’s previous books:
About A Murmuration
Cooke’s sensibility
is European in a way unusual for an English language poet. There is a fine
sensuousness in the language … a book of unexpected, quiet pleasures.
Caitriona O’Reilly, Poetry Salzburg Review
A Murmuration … has a pleasing unity, a quiet craft and a
consistent gentleness in how it probes the past and how that past shapes the
present. Cooke is a natural lyric poet who understands the roots of his own
poetry.
D.A. Prince, London Grip
… attests
to Cooke’s concern with the poem as a well-made object whose linguistic and
sonic configurations are as delicately constructed as a well-sprung dancefloor.
Tom Phillips, Raceme
Cooke’s
lyrical insight and precision make the personal universal.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
… a
welcome lack of showiness.
John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
About Work Horses
David
Cooke is a fine poet. Out of the diverse cultures and histories explored in Work
Horses, he draws his civilized pattern.
William Bedford, The London Magazine
Multi-layered,
and laced through with heart and humanity, this is a collection to be admired
initially and re-visited.
Wendy Klein, The North
