bees

I’ve written a lot of poems over the past eighteen months. Some of them have gone up on my website, others have been shared on facebook and Twitter, several became part of my set when I’m doing a gig, and a few haven’t yet found a home at all. In a quiet moment just before Xmas I decided the best of them belonged together, in a new book. So during January – dry January, when I wasn’t drinking, work was thin on the ground, and I had time on my hands – I got on with putting the book together.
As anyone who’s read my work will know, a fair number of my poems deal with current affairs, with politics, with providing some small counterbalance to the way we’re asked to view the world around us. A lot of them tackle serious issues with humour. Almost all of them address human resilience, people’s passion and enthusiasm for life despite the difficulties and disappointments of the day-to-day. I wanted the title of the book to reflect this, and came up with one idea after the other. None of them quite worked. Then I stumbled up on a six-line poem I’d jotted down in a notebook, and there it was, the perfect title: more bees bigger bonnets.
Compiling the book was easier than I thought. Then came the tricky part – putting it out to people for review. Contacting people I know and asking them to say something about my work took me a long way out of my comfort zone. It’s infinitely infinitely infinitely (note: three infinites is a LOT) more nerve-wracking than getting up in front of an audience, and just thinking about doing it made my toes curl in a way which defied the laws of physics and anatomy. Fortunately for me there are some very generous and talented people out there who took time out of their busy lives to read and review the book – and I’m incredibly grateful to them for doing that, as well as slightly overwhelmed by what they’ve had to say.
I’d originally set a publication date of 1st May – I liked the symbolism of unleashing the book into the world on a day of both celebration and defiance – but the book was ready to go to the printers a lot earlier than I expected. So I decided I’d put it on sale from 1st April, April Fools Day. I liked the symbolism of that, too. And now the printers are saying the books will be with me way earlier than the start of April, and – seeing as I have next to no understanding of the concept of delayed gratification, and am brim-full of the polar opposite of the patience of a saint – I’ve decided I’ll start selling it as soon as I can. Which means that I’m chuffed to bits to announce that more bees bigger bonnets will be available on the ignitebooks website from Monday 9th March. This means that anyone with the same level of impatience as me can get their mitts on it pretty damn quick.
Enough of the blather. One final point, and I’ll finish. I want my poems to get out there and be read by as many people as possible as soon as possible, so there’s a special low price on copies bought between now and the end of March. Patience may be a virtue, but – on this occasion at least – impatience shall get its reward.