Tomorrow We Will Live Here by Ryan van Winkle

Ryan van Winkle is well known in Edinburgh, for being the Scottish Poetry Library's Reader in Residence and for running the wildly popular Golden Hour event at the Forest Cafe, until the cafe shut. Crafty Green Boyfriend and I regularly went along to the Golden Hour and enjoyed its unpredictable mix of poetry, stories, music and cartoons. I was even allowed to read my poetry on the stage there once!

Ryan is also an award winning poet and Tomorrow, We Will Live here is his first collection and I've finally got round to reviewing it!

There is something about these poems, which makes me want to re-read them. Ryan has a distinctive poetic voice (something that seems not too common these days to be honest) and a real ability to create mood and atmosphere.

There's a sense of times lost in may of these poems. In My 100-Year Old Ghost, he talks about his ghost who:

........................tries to sell me on simpler times:
the grass soft, endless -
lampless nights
pools of crickets singing.

In They Tore the Bridge Down a Year Later he regrets the new bridge, where the traffic is too heavy

and me and my boy can't sit there,
let the water pass.

There are poems here about the smell of gasoline, doing the laundry, the sense of dread of moving into a new home (The Apartment, which ends: and Christ, tomorrow / we will live here) and a death row prisoner dreaming of rain. Plenty of poems about various stages of relationships too.


Tomorrow, We Will Live Here by Ryan van Winkle published by Salt.

posted as part of Brighton Blogger's 2012 reading Challenge

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more.