New Poetry Book – 350 Million Oven-Ready World-Beating Poems

My poems on Boris Johnson, Cummings, Brexit and Covid-19 are now available as a paperback.

In The UK:

Poetry – John Phillips – Heavenly Bodies.

Another one from John’s book Shorts and Shots.

Heavenly bodies

The galleon moon

Sailing through the Winter sky

Tomorrow the frost.

The full moon is high

Reflections of hidden sun

Turning night to day.

Swooping hungry Owl

The hunters moon revealing

This evenings meal.

Darkness into light

Blue moon low over the sea

Rippling silver.

Behold the Great Bear

Master of the northern sky

Signpost for sailors.

Look to the night sky

Stars like a river of light

It’s the Milky Way.

The sky is alive

Autumn meteor shower

Falling like the rain.

Venus is rising

Lighting up the southern sky

Star of the morning.

Autumn sunset glow

Colours of the evening

Purple, red and green.

Fire is in the east

Clouds aglow orange and red

The sun is rising

The trees are smiling

Sunlight sparkles on the leaves

Summer here at last.

Sun is in hiding

Wind from the north sweeps the land

Winter is coming.

Today’s Music to keep me SANe in Isolation – Jack Kerouac.

I just felt like getting back into the old fifties Jazz. Jack Kerouac put some of his music to jazz music. It captured something of that mad time – jazz, sex and travel, reefer, zen and crazy. Life was for kicks and Sartori.  There was no time to waste. Crazy, crazy, crazy, man.

Back when I was young these were like diamonds. You couldn’t get them. Thanks to the internet we have access to all manner of gems.

The only question is whether having such easy access makes everything less important.

Today I’m listening to Jack creating a whole new era out of black music and the search for truth. Go, Go Jack. You changed the world!!

Poetry – Infinity 10 – A pebble into the void

IMG_5777

By popular demand – from Anna and Cheryl – another pebble into the emptiness of the void. A young man’s attempt to wrestle with the eternal questions that reside in the pit of forever, the emptiness of nothing and the length of a piece of string.

I had the time, energy and enthusiasm to wrestle with the substance of infinity when I was twenty. I wasn’t this cynical misery I now am. I thought I could make gold out of iron and divine the meaning of the universe.

These infinity poems were my revelations.

Nirvana or bust!

Infinity 10 – A pebble into the void

I am concentration surpassed

I am the rising and falling of insight

I am the hallucination of form

I am a fantasy of splendour

No thoughts do I possess.

I am the feeling that the poet knows

I am the strength of the warriors arm

I am the beauty of a summer’s day

I am the trinity of power

What you have of me I gave

I am the power of the circle

I am the pentagon’s mystery

I am the triangle’s meaning

I am the alphabet’s cause

But mine is no letter or number

Opher 1973

Poetry – Vice and Verse – another similar in concept to the first.

If you enjoyed my first book of poetry then this one is similar.

Vice and Verse cover

This is my second anthology of poems. I do not claim to be a poet. I have no pretensions in that direction. I just like writing. Sometimes ideas and feelings come out as what I describe as poems and sometimes they come out as my version of novels. For me it is all about communication and playing with words. Words are slippery things, like eels. Their meanings are nuanced. When you put them together they are tinged with other sheen. They wriggle into other forms. A word is amazing. It is a symbol, sometimes for a very tenuous concept, that we are able to use to touch each other with. We assume that each word we select has exactly the same baggage for everyone else. I doubt it does. These are not my words. They are borrowed. The arrangements are mine though. I have organised them to have a flow, a rhythm and to interact with purpose. Perhaps this will be obvious, but perhaps not. Some have humour and some are imbued with fury. I occasionally use my words like ballistic missiles. They deliver a warhead. I hope you appreciate them. I have attached my other words in the form of extensions to illuminate, exaggerate and confuscate. Even confuscation can be good. I write to make a difference – hopefully a positive difference.

The good news is that I’m working on a third!

If you would like to own my poetry book:

 

Allen Ginsberg – the reawakening of poetry.

Poetry – Allen Ginsberg and seeing the light

Poetry was destroyed for me by school.

Firstly in Primary school there was the emphasis on memorising great chunks of turgid verse.

Each week we would be given a long poem by Wordsworth or Tennyson to learn by heart. You were called to stand and recite a verse. If you had not learnt it you had to stay in and miss your Physical Exercise. Now PE was something I really looked forward to and although I had a good memory I could not always be bothered to memorise the meaningless drivel. Many was the afternoon I spent watching morosely out of the window while the rest of the class were outside.

It did not get much better in Secondary school. We analysed the metre, rhyme and metaphor until the whole process was just a bore. I did not want it any more. The only highlight was the whole class excitedly chanting the Jumblies.

Poetry was moribund. It was the stuff of the old and dreary. It had no connection with my life or the world I inhabited. This was the sixties. There was loud music, parties, girls, motorbikes and excitement. Who cared about daffodils? I was young, wild and drinking in life. All that stuff pertained to a boring old world.

Then a friend gave me a copy of Howl. I was seventeen and the words leapt out at me. We were up against the establishment; a mouldering old set of values, a dreary, grey bunch of old foggies who were shoving careers and exams down our throats, who wanted us to settle down in suburbia, mow our grass, wash our cars and have two babies just like them. We were screaming for colour!!

We were alive and wanted to live, to burn and to run free. We didn’t want shackles, restraints and cages.

They hounded us from all sides and we laughed in their face.

Suddenly there was a poem for us. I saw the best minds of my generation trying to smash out of the cage, trying to piss in their petrol tanks, put sand in their gear-boxes. We didn’t not want in to that mortuary. We wanted to live.

Here was a guy I could understand.

I’d been bopping through those negro nights high on life, talking my head off, shouting up at the stars, drunk on being.

I devoured it like it was ambrosia from the gods.

I had discovered Allen Ginsberg. Poetry had come alive. We were all angel-headed hipsters looking for a mystical connection to the universe; wanting to make sense of it all.

Life was a wild journey and we had to wring every last drop out of it.

No more lawns to mow, cars to wash or careers to follow – this was a mad saxophone wail into the torment of the cosmos and I wanted my soul to be in that wail. I wanted to live.

There was a mind to explore, limits to transgress and all possibility to challenge.

I knew I had people to meet, places to go and minds to explore. There was ecstasy out there. There was truth, Zen and a whole teeming inferno to explore!

I had discovered Allen Ginsberg and he had opened my eyes.

Poetry was communication on a level that made sense at last!

Poetry could be about real life!!

Poetry – Communication – a poem to the expansion of minds that takes place when we talk and listen to each other.

There is nothing better than a debate, discussion and argument between friends as we pierce the truth of all we know.

For only in the sharing, thinking through and weighing up can we hope to grow.

Our minds illuminate the truths that grow inside our heads as our brains are stimulated by the concepts of others. Ideas and thoughts chase each other and, like pinballs, they collide and spark new, exciting answers.

Talk is the nourishment of the neurones. It gives birth to new delights.

Communication

Communicate with me

For that is how we grow.

Open your mind

For me to see

And delight

In what we find.

 

Share your thoughts

And hear mine

And we will nod our heads

As we ponder

Upon the truths

Of what we both have said.

 

Opher 3.7.2015

Poetry – New Poetry Anthology – Vice and Verse – out now in paperback for £4.15 or Kindle for £1.99. There’s a few in here you’ll love!

My new Poetry book ‘Vice and Verse’ is out now on amazon!

Just £1.99 for the kindle version or £4.15 for the paperback. Once again the cover is one of my own paintings.

Why not support your local author and poet? Treat yourself. There’s nothing like an Opher!

Check out my other books on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Opher-Goodwin/e/B00MSHUX6Y/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1436197741&sr=1-2-ent

Poetry – My Second Anthology of poems – Vice and Verse – is now available on kindle format on Amazon for just £1.99 – why not give it a try?

Hi – I’m delighted to say that my second anthology of poems is now out on Amazon in Kindle form. The paperback version will be following shortly.

For those that have followed me you have seen what my poems are like. This is your chance to own them. I’ve put them out at the lowest price allowed. I hope you enjoy them.

All the best

Opher

 

I’ll let you know when the paperback is available!