The Poetry of Nicholas Hancock
The Poet of Despair
Published by The British Hancock Society
with the permission of the author.
THE GONG FARMER* |
Here in this dark pit beneath the castle
wall a whistling turd goes pat into the slurry's
well.
I wait for the last bit, turn to the boy
Tom Tall. 'Go bang it with your bat: the
shitless hour tell.'
The gong he starts to hit: they hear it in
the hall. I don my stinking hat, sink boots
in faecal hell.
Right fast I scoop the shit which might your
soul appal; Tom Short hauls up what's shat
and what the bowels dispel.
I feel, in fumes unfit for humans, something
fall from heaven, something fat upon my back.
What fell?
Despite the gong, the slit above expels a
squall of faeces from the slot: my tongue
I fain must quell.
Here in this dark pit beneath the castle
wall a whistling turd goes pat upon my hat
as well.
* Servant employed by the castle to clean
out the sewage pits below the battlements.
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Nicholas Hancock is one of those few writers
who is so uncannily in tune with the reader
(any reader) that one has the uneasy feeling
that Hancock is not the real author at all
- but you are. It is as if by some mysterious
metaphysical alchemy the author of Metafizzical Essays and Others* has ransacked your brain of its ideative
content, then flown off to his Liverpool
roost to commit it to paper.
Nicholas Hancock was born in Sussex in 1933 but spent most
of his youth in a Dickensian school owned
by his mother in rural Wiltshire. From his
17th to 19th year he was a peón or gaucho
in Uruguay. After his National Service, he
worked, among other things, on a farm, in
a shoulder pad factory and on a seiner on
the North Sea before studying at the Sorbonne
in 1954-55. In 1989 his novel La Béatification was published in French Canada. In 1990-91
Nicholas cycled extensively in Europe, North
Africa and the Middle East, being in Petra
for the outbreak of the Gulf War and meeting
his future wife in a Prague pastry shop.
In 1998 Phénix published his French poetry
in the collection Choses tristes while in the following year the National
Poetry Foundation published some of his English
poems in Window for a Monad. His most commercially successful novel:
Daniel and Miriam was recently published by Acorn Publications
and is available from most bookshops.
*Metafizzical Essays and Others: Available in paperback from Amazon price:
£14.50
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