This week's Sunday Morning Poet is famed Birmingham author, Charlie Hill. Charlie's work has appeared in TLS, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the New Statesman the Big Issue and many other places too, and now finally, well let's hope not finally... here's Charlie in Outsideleft. Charlie's latest book is The State of Us which you can find here.
The Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band
At 4AM I woke, clammy with Rioja, and from somewhere in the deathful dark – that squirmed with an overburdened NHS, The Sixth Extinction, a son and daughter no longer ringletted – a word slowly formed – bri? bric? brickhouse? – slewed into another – rastrick! – and compelled me to a slumbrous Googling.
And if I didn’t later rise with vim, I did at least drink coffee and bodge on through; for the news that the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band stank out the charts when I was seven hadn’t abandoned me to the entwining melancholy of my own ringlets, or Dr O’Donovan dispensing lollipops in a gap between extinctions, but instead left me distractedly agog at the origin of my nocturnal prompt and the quietly gladdening charge of wonder…
© Charlie Hill
Essential Information
Main image Chantal Pitts' sketch of Charlie Hill from the Outsideleft Bookshop Day event at Bear Bookshop
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