Dummy!

‘I am the man who abandoned Alan Bennett under a bus shelter in Armley,’ writes Jim Greenhalf in his new collection. It’s partly an instruction manual for dummies on how to hack out a kind of contentment in spite of the times, even if you have an inflated prostate and ‘a pig’s bladder of piss’ strapped to your leg. Dummy! is also a book about History. It’s a reverie of times passing – ‘when peace was love/and love was free for all/who could afford it’ – a howl of mockery, and a refusal to join in the triumphal march of post-Modernity. It’s a study in difficulty and dismay, and an attempt to praise the mutilated world in spite of all its disappointments.

Author Biography

Jim Greenhalf was born in 1949, grew up in East London and worked for nearly forty years as a news and feature writer for Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus newspaper. His books of poetry include Out of Passion with the Times, The Dog’s Not Laughing, The Unlikelihood of Intimacy in the Next Six Hours, Blue on Blue, The Man in the Mirror, Breakfast at Wetherspoons and Dummy! He lives in Saltaire.