Reproduced on 18/12/2020 from Big Mac Facebook site.  Friday, 27 March 2020.  Hi everyone. I woke up this morning and wished I hadn’t. One moment we were doing our usual dance worship of the Big Mac band, the Coronavirus just a new rock group that probably wouldn’t last, and the next moment a few weeks later here we are, the Earl Haig just a distant memory as if it were yesterday, and yesterday the same as today with everybody shunning me as if I had the fucking plague.  Last night I waited for Val to push me my porridge through the serving hatch of the isolation unit that the government had ordered me to convert the garden shed into. Then I got totally blinged up, even down to the diamante red trousers and dancing shoes and the turquoise crystal rivet belt that I’d had specially made for me by myself and then I clicked on one of the Big Mac videos and closed my eyes. And the years fell away and I was back in the Earl Haig of recent weeks; but when my eyes bl...

   24, 06, 20   Review of Loose Canon by Mike McNamara  McNamara is a poet, songwriter, singer and leader of Big Mac’s Wholly Soul Band, now becalmed under lockdown but still, one hopes, ready to re-launch itself when the tide comes in again. Meanwhile, he has been writing and collating his poems, and the latest, and longest, of three recent collections is now published under the semantically layered title of “Loose Canon”. The others are “This Transmission” and “ Dialling a Starless Past”.  Loose Canon has been described in a review as being Art Nouveau and New Goth, but many commentators, including myself, would say that the author has a style, or perhaps fractured style, that is all his own. That being the case, the straightest way to do justice to his latest published work, it seems to me, is to treat of a selection from it, each chosen item, I trust, yielding insight into not only the poetry but also the poet. He is, after all, a presence in much that he wr...

  Laurence Peddle 17/ 10/ 2019 All hyperlinks are at the end of the article. highlight a link, right-click it, then click on the link in the drop down menu Review of Michael McNamara’s This Transmission Preliminaries  Michael McNamara, Rebecca Watts, Hollie McNish and Wordsworth are the protagonists. The setting is a classics-orientated Oxbridge public garden or area of land used for recreation. In her 2018 PN Review article “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, Rebecca Watts used her barbed pen to take the gloss off the new fashion, as she saw it, for young female poets and spoken-word artists with populist appeal, whom she charged with substituting so-called honesty and authenticity for talent and hard-grafted workmanship. This caused some long-smouldering embers to re-ignite, and Hollie McNish, one of her main targets, retaliated in kind and turned some of the heat back on Watts. Wordsworth, meanwhile, very sensibly stayed dead. Michael McNamara, always alive but neither young n...