10th November I went to the Exeter launch of Harry Guest's new book Some Times from Anvil Press. This is the first literary event I've been to in Exeter Central Library. It was a really fine reading, as expected, sensitive, beautiful poems and Harry's readings bringing them immediately into sharp focus. 'The Custard Mountains' is first one in the book about a young boy mishearing a word in a radio performance of a Lorca poem. It would be a funny story anyway but with Harry Guest's verbal invention of exotic landscapes in variations of yellow we are led into the daydreams of childhood imagination recovered through unreliable proliferating memory. And the poem's humour and imagination is a tribute to Lorca. It's a generous intelligent book by a restless and passionate writer. Of course Harry Guest draws a good crowd in Exeter and the event had that buzz with a big queue for signed books, a good night for Anvil and the library. The cover design of Some Times is by Tamasin Cole, based on a painting by Piran Bishop.
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