Coral keyboardist releases new poetry collection 'Holy Nowhere'

Image - 'Response to Managed Decline' by Low Coney (2015). Analogue collage from found imagery.  

"Imagine a teenage paean to love and death, like S.E Hinton's The Outsiders set in a Northwest England shit-town," says author Nick Power as he launches new poetry collection 'Holy Nowhere' via erbacce-press.

"It's hard to categorise the work. There are poems, prose, monologues, snippets of dialogue, snatches of songs. The form, or the definition of the form is of no great concern really. What I've always been attracted to is the message contained within. The attitude. The world that is built in the mind of the reader."

'Holy Nowhere' builds on Power's debut collection ‘Small Town Chase’ but in a more sinister way.

Nick said: "The collection is a view of a city from a high vantage point over the river. Much of the work is set at night high up on construction cranes or warehouses and electricity substations.

“A recurring symbol in the book as seen on the cover, is the pharmacy crucifix. It crops up in a few of the pieces to represent how the cult of religion and the cult of drugs are essentially the same.

“A lot of the work concerns heightened emotion about love, death and hopelessness – but in a way a teenager would feel."

Here's an online exclusive of 'Managed Decline' from the collection. 

Managed Decline

We play board games through the long night. Séance rituals

in dim rooms. We can hear the rain outside. Wind whistling

through plasterboard walls. Cold water expanding through

worn sealant. And we keep rolling the dice, picking cards.

Huddled around a candle. Fingertips pressed onto an old,

rare coin. What do the letters spell? L U C I N D A. Lucinda

reckons we’re trying to scare her. We all swear differently.

She gets drunk, fast drunk, and says she doesn’t want to look

at the doorway anymore. She’s cross- legged with her hands

over her ears, eyes glued to the bare floor. We ask her why

and she says somebody is standing there, a man with part of

his throat lopped off.

The council in our area say the club want to expand on the

stadium. That they’ve been buying up all of the terraces in

these streets to avoid the planning permission guidelines.

Managed decline I think they call it. They’ve forced everyone

out, turned us into a ghost town. A local business turfing

people out of their own homes. Destroying communities.

The stadium itself towers over every street, every avenue for

almost a mile. There’s no escaping its gravity. It creates its

own enormous silence.

Every house but ours is earmarked for demolition. We’re the

only ones who are staying put. We refuse to move because

this is where are souls are rooted, in the memories of our

ancestors. This is who we are.

Click here to purchase 'Holy Nowhere'