My Tin Watermelon

The new book, My Tin Watermelon, is available today from Salt: https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/my-tin-watermelon-9781784632090 - buy it from their website.

The poems are mostly from the last three years while I’ve been working on a PhD at Goldsmiths. I wanted to confront Truth and Beauty, those fearsome abstract nouns which supposedly are or are not the same thing, though much of the time it comes down to Things (which will be a relief to every poet and reader brought up on ‘No Ideas but in Things’).

Things are real, and we invest them with value and feeling. Richard Scott kindly said about my poems: ‘Peter Daniels is engaged in a kind of poetic archaeology, unearthing what has been hidden and celebrating its considerable beauty.’ Much of the archaeology is about the things in my life and the value and feeling I’ve found in them. I’m a queer poet of 65 and the world’s falling apart as I begin to fall apart myself, so hanging on to tin watermelons is the best answer I can find for ‘Do we need Truth and Beauty any more?’

There are also poems of urban gardens, transport, underwear, and of course birth-copulation-and-death – ‘You’d be bored’, said Eliot, but I hope you won’t be.