A book of many parts

Here at Cinnamon Press we are still celebrating the sanity of Borders, who have invited patrick jones to launch darkness is where the stars are at their Cardiff branch on December 11th after his reading in the Welsh Assembly.

There’s been some debate about the invitation to patrick to read in the Welsh Assembly, most of it sadly missing the point. Christian Voice were not provoked into their extremist reaction –
patrick has been in dialogue with them for ages, long before a launch was planned, and the idea that the victim deserves threats of violence is absurd. But more to the point what matters is not how CV came by patrick’s poems, but how they reacted – with threats, the language of the battle ground and bully tactics.

The other really big point that is being missed in the debate is that the poems about religion (and they are not vitriol, but serious engagement) are a tiny minority of the poems in this book. There is a stunningly good and poignant sequence on domestic abuse against men; poems about urgent ecological issues, poems about war and pacifism, poems about education and much more.

The great thing about having a launch date and brave venues like Y Ddraig Goch Cafe, Caernarfon is that people will get the chance to not only see this great range on the page, but to hear the poems performed – and patrick is a fantastic performance poet. If you can’t get to one of the venues we’ll be putting up video footage on YouTube.