Full Description
John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals - disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners. To be common here is to share not only qualities but stories with many others - to be classed alongside people with similar origins and become connected also to what is commonplace in the world of animals and plants, days and tables. Sky and sea dominate as the speakers search for oneness and completion, confronted by vast silences and the shadow of Brighton's collapsing West Pier. John McCullough has published four previous collections, one with Salt and three with Penned in the Margins, most recently, the Costa-shortlisted Reckless Paper Birds (2019), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Panic Response (2022), which included his long poem 'Flowers of Sulphur', shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Contents
11 Choir
I: The Body of the Crowd
15 Giraffe
16 The Dreams of Moss
17 Bad Habits
18 Dawn of the West Pier
19 Legs
20 Marginalia
21 Queer Studies
22 Night School
23 Field Trip
24 Portholes
25 Interview with the West Pier
26 Family
27 Masses
28 Quiver
29 The Red Houses of My Ancestors
30 Non-Stop
31 Popcorn
32 I Was Born in an Adidas Tracksuit
33 And Let's Not Forget Tables
34 The Humans
35 The West Pier Tries Arizona
36 Parallel Circuits
37 Rainbows Don't Exist
II: The Crowd of the Body
41 If Loneliness Is a Moth
42 The Innocents
43 To a Glass of Water
44 The Visitors
45 Shotgun
46 Blacksmith
47 Rungs
48 St Simeon the Stylite
50 Sunfish
51 The West Pier's CV
52 I Am the Mob
53 The Long Jumper's Diary
54 Chirp Chirp
55 Against Me
56 Greeting the Hoverfly
57 Shut Up and Jump in the Jeep
58 Abracadabra!
59 Watermelon Man
60 Don't Mention It
61 Small Green Thing
62 Disclaimer
63 Please
64 Flight of the Birches
65 Push the Button
66 Song of the West Pier
67 Looking
69 ['I don't want to have everything I want']
71 Notes
