Cover design: Gainford Design Associates. Photograph: 'Helmet' by Dominic, Westgate Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Shakespeare and Newcastle-upon-Tyne collide with dazzingly original results in this sequence of fifty-six poems inspired by many of the dramatist's plays. Graham allows the rough energy of this Northern city to pulse through the book as many aspects of contemporary and predominantly low-life Geordie experience are viewed through a wide range of Shakespeare's characters. Familiar figures from the plays reappear in bizarre guises so that these punchy, provocative and often humorous poems offer an unexpected and disturbing experience.
From reviews of Desmond Graham's Not Falling (Seren, 1999) in which eight of the After Shakespeare poems first appeared:
A remarkable evocation of a neighbourhood sinking into decay, yet peopled by odd, forgotten lives; outsiders, lovers and loners, washed up seamen and retired policemen, seen in the light of Shakespearean prototypes. NEW WELSH REVIEW
A gallery of urban low-life cleverly linked to Shakespearean analogues. Thus an old Frank Zappa fan and biker turned tattoo artist is an inner-city Prospero ... and a painter of Hell's Angels crash helmets is Ferdinand, transforming reality in unpromising circumstances into art and exhibiting 'a love of light where you would least expect to find it'. Graham, a poet who notices such things, has a way of finding those fugitive rays of light. Nicholas Murray, POETRY WALES
Graham comes at cultural classics from unexpected angles ... Macbeth runs a protection racket, a thug with a Rolls and a mobile phone, and Coriolanus is a mafioso gangster ... the breadth of reference enables him to embrace playfulness and a sense of poignancy and affection Claire Powell, PLANET
After Shakespeare costs £7.50 and has ISBN 1-873226-45-4. It was published in 2001.
Until recently Desmond Graham was Professor of Poetry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but is now a full-time writer with homes in Newcastle and Southern Germany. Flambard Press has published four themed collections by him, After Shakespeare (2001), Milena poems (2004), Heart work (2007) and The Green Parakeet (2009), as well as Two Darknesses (1994), a selection of poems by the major Polish poet Anna Kamienska that he co-translated. Graham’s poems have been widely translated into Polish and French. His is also well known as the biographer and editor of the poet Keith Douglas.
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