A few poems from The Never-Never

The Wardrobe

This wood is not about the old wives and the oak
or the ash that separates a summer from a soak.

And that afternoon when a sky turned dark,
though it might have been the Ark

itself as twelve men in Sunday drink had shouldered it
from the house of the last widow left

on Beaufort Hill, this is not about the front step,
the angle, lift and give, the driving curses of their stoops;

not even how, at a loss, they took at it with the axe
and nailed it by bits back; every loving cuff and coax.

Or how for years the doors would fall open
as if it was - loosely speaking - a lopsided heaven;

how it proved by the burning it was only wood,
as much this felled as when it stood.

And last with every man now decades gone,
singing, I push them down the Taff to Avalon,

the river become rain or a spread of that fire.
No. these are the stories. This was the weather.


Saint Anthony of Padua

My only saint, O hear now the prayer of raw knees,
of dowsing palms under brown settees,
all commonplaces of fivers keys and things misplaced,
itching back to the anonymities. I call upon the grace

of faces pasted to pissed-up walls of the coach stations,
your cult of tired tourists moved just clear of salvation
and geriatrics dribbling for the name of their daughter,
the flare's phosphor bronze over that body of water.

Not even a clock, the sameness of and unused days
can trouble or escape the kind tragedy of your gaze.
And when I miss and drop like this, I'll prove you near
to the soul and the sock, my sad career.

Buy The Never-Never at

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1854113658/qid=1105545667/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-7201234-0619853

Praise for The Never-Never:

'Kathryn Gray's poetry is delightfully accessible, intelligent, full of deftly rendered detail and attractive cadences. Somehow or other - through sheer talent and instinct, I would say - she has established a convincing and utterly contemporary balance of fragility and assurance.'

Douglas Dunn


'Gray has an intense sense of the deconsecrated which together with the equestrienne snap and snuffle of her poems make this an original and thoroughly twenty-first century debut.'

Maurice Riordan


'A winner'

Peter Finch


'A spirited performance...mysterious...chilling.'

Alan Brownjohn, The Sunday Times


'[The] hallmarks of Gray's style are there: the eye for detail, the panache...These poems swarm with (often dazzling) effect...this is attention-grabbing stuff.'

Poetry Wales


'Kathryn Gray's The Never-Never manifests an intelligence and an outward interest especially refreshing in a first collection...poems employ dense yet sinuous lines in such a way as to render a moment lush in its emotional fullness...an intelligent emotional complexity. The Never-Never brings together an array of accomplished poems, remarkable in their singularity of style and interest and that is to be applauded.'

Carrie Etter, New Welsh Review


'She finds beautiful imagery in surprisingly familiar places...a taut, chilling narrative...shows up Gray's talent for giving a rare poetic voice to twentysomething anxieties.'

Clare Pollard, Magma


'Formal relish and exuberance'

Poetry Review


'Kathryn Gray clearly has talent and in this, her first collection, she puts it on display in poems which are, by turns, clever, witty and formally accomplished. 'The Collect' - the Never-Never of the collection - construes a land of childhood that has to be paid for, though 'when they'd come/we, all grown up now, would never be home'. Kathryn Gray, in contrast, does pay up, with interest.'

Greg Hill, Planet


This is a debut collection of poems bursting with vitality. Each poem takes us into a different world, as they twist and turn with rich language and form, and each works as a whole, unique piece every time. The atmosphere of every poem shines with a quickness and liveliness of its own, from the upbeat feel of ‘Joyrider’ – ‘Come, hot-wired from the city, down a one-car lane, over the keystone bridge that cannot take the headlong rush’ . . . to the more sad, slow ‘Or Nothing (after Williams Carlos Williams)’ – ‘Or nothing, a pious wish to whiteness gone over, a cluster, flower by flower, white desire, empty, a single stem.’

Kathryn Gray captures the reader’s senses and emotions with sparkling skill and wit throughout. She has been shortlisted for the 2004 T.S. Eliot Prize.

Clare Maynard, Welsh Books Council (www.gwales.com)