Mark Waldron Comments

Mark Waldron's collections: The Brand New Dark, Salt Publishing, Cambridge,2008 The Itchy Sea, Salt Publishing, London,2011 Meanwhile, Trees, Bloodaxe Books, Hexham,2016

In The Boston Review, poet and critic Dai George wrote: '' Waldron has been busy forging a new language of deadpan, twenty-first century surreal, as receptive to John Berryman's influence as anything written in the wake of The Dream Songs, as sceptical of the lyric self as anything in John Ashbery, and usually a lot funnier.''

Waldron was born in 1960 in New York and grew up in London where he still lives. He works as an advertising copywriter, a creative and playful profession but one he is ambivalent about. Waldron began to write poetry seriously in his early forties, attending workshops with Michael Donaghy at first and later with Roddy Lumsden. In 2008 he published his first collection

Called ‘the most striking and unusual new voice’ in contemporary British poetry’ by John Stammers, Mark Waldron brings us a world at once real and unreal, familiar and strange.

His self-reflexive poems break the fourth wall and then give the fourth wall a personality. He is pursued by a cast of recurring characters who seem to rebel against their creator. Original, accessible and fantastical, Waldron’s wit, weirdness and dazzle saw him named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.