Poetry Will Have To Do
Adam RW
Poetry Will Have To Do is Adam RW’s debut collection: an assortment of short stories and poems inspired by finding the absurd in the mundane. In its pages you will find tales of anxious pints of milk, succinctly enthusiastic greetings cards, passive aggressive personal space battles on public transport and much more. With illustrations by Chloe Murr.
As featured in the National Poetry Library
Contents: Baby!, Too Many Cooks, The Build-Up to an Overtake, No Rain Yet, The Blinking Cursor, Dolores, Reserved for Ice Cream Van, A Can of Fizzy Pop, Tablecloth, Day, Egg Under Pedal, Cool Dads, Barbershop Quartet, A Way With Words, Block, Do Not Go Into The Lake Just Yet, Explode Into Life, Maelstrom, Grapple, Morning Painter, On Doodling, Public Disgrace, Southbound, The laughing Gravy, Two Accounts, The Milk's Gone Off Me, Take Them to the Wood, On Poetry, No Tresspassers!, Highly Specific Orders, Edith, Frost, Litany, On The Bus.
On Poetry
I do not have the attention span
to read a novel
Poetry will have to do
In any case
characters and paragraphs
whole worlds
aching, lengthy chapters
these leave me hot and itchy
ill at ease and upside down in bed
But a poem, fully formed
is truly perfect
like a glass of ice water
on the hottest June day
(or a spoonful of honey
when I have low blood sugar)
Sweet succinctness all I need
satisfying my desires most deliciously
Novels are far more grand and ostentatious
a parade of men crashing into my room
on that same hot June day
All of them brushing themselves down
and insisting on their own importance
carrying a long and girthy hosepipe
full of words and themes so fine
bursting and flowing along
They are quite perturbed then to see
that a single glass of water has sated me
For I have no need for thousands of pages
for Tolstoy, Dickens or any of those other frauds
Give me Angelou or Plath (not Hughes)
Brackenbury, Wordsworth, one of those
And let them strike an arrow
to my dehydrated heart
Published December 2023
Designed by Jo Gray
Edited by Elsa Kenningham
Illustrated by Chloe Murr
Printed in the UK
68 pages
180mm x 110mm
ISBN: 978-1-7384402-1-4
RRP £10.99
Poetry / Short stories