Birthday greeting from 'George'

Latest review of 'Monkey' (Selected India Poems) posted on amazon.co.uk

"John Gimblett illuminates the transient and fleeting into a tangible solidarity of senses. For a moment in time you see what the poet sees and understands of India and we learn from his affinity with the place. From his compassion for the people of India in his poems Man in Calcutta where he lets us know that this man with his twisted body will not be forgotten to Ignored Again where he highlights the dead man by the line `We gave him barely a glance, travelled on' giving recognition to him as a person in a context that was determined to give him no such recognition . He can also turn the spotlight on us, in The Stared-at where we become the object, the viewed, the different. Not all of the poems are set in India but wherever John Gimblett travels you can almost feel you have journeyed there too. You can see, smell and think his poetry."

by Atticus 1, 29/5/13

 Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.

Mithras column

Roman Legion Museum, Caerleon.

It's finished!

..as the closing bars of Gorecki's Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) played out, so did the novel.

Another read-through, some editing, and the novel should be available as a Kindle ebook hopefully around Easter time.

Watching for The Dawn - music

The end is nigh..

at least for this novel. The end is always the most difficult and to do it I need to be in exactly the right frame of mind. The right mood and especially the right mental state. And of course as with We Go Down Slowly Rising I need the right music to help with the mood.

I'm probably less than a dozen or so pages from this ending and it all gets a bit hectic from now on in. The end of the first P.I. Wall novel exhausted me; left me sleepless and exhausted for some time afterwards. The music for that final 'scene' was the Cocteau Twins mostly.

So I'm ready to start writing again today and trying to summon up the muses with:

John Taverner - The Protecting Veil (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Justin Brown)
Arvo Part - Fratres (for string orchestra and percussion) and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Jarvi)
King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black album

There'll possibly be others. I'm already heading for my copy of Gorecki's Third Symphony (original London Sinfonietta version with the sublime Dawn Upshaw singing soprano). As always.

Watching For The Dawn

Watching For The Dawn continues apace today. Been thinking about it a lot - daily - but no actual writing has taken place until this morning. It's going slowly as, reading through the past few chapters, I keep editing instead of moving forward.

Apologies if you've been waiting eagerly to find out what happens to P.I. Wall in this second book, but it really is quite close to the end now.

'It’s the only time he’d ever had to lie that he was going to go and have sex, rather than lie that he’d gone and had sex.'