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Tom Pickard, The Dark Months of May

In part a chronicle of misfortune and heartbreak, The Dark Months of May tells of life on the run. With his characteristic bawdiness and sonic aplomb, Pickard seeks refuge in the geography of British border ballads, accompanied by eighteenth-century horse thieves and 'desperate reprobates.' There, he finds only cold consolation: 'leave me now and let me sleep / your thieving words are all I'll keep.'

"I love the way each pulse of the indivisible sentence, here in The Dark Months of May, echoes Hardy, when bitterness referred to a virtue, and the strict ticks of a mind hearing what it sees makes syntax as saintly as it is. It reminds me of an old romantic recording, static and dry and incorruptibly noted."
Fanny Howe

"In these days of technological wizardry it might be a safe guess to say that poets have become rather thin on the ground. I mean to say that there seems to be a surplus of estate agents, bankers, media people, technocrats, lawyers, accountants et cetera, but the poet, the noble bard, appears to have almost slipped off the map. This is one reason why I'm terribly glad that Tom Pickard is alive and kicking, because in fact he is the living embodiment of poet-dom (there, I just invented it!). Poetry for me is like trying to capture the essence of life experience. Through the heart and mind and a concoction of senses, the poet attempts to distill everything down to word - visually, rhythmically and sonically. In this way the poem speaks a new language of the soul. Allowing us to enter through a new portal of consciousness perhaps, or at least, giving us a moment's pause for reflection. To try to describe Tom's poems would be pointless. They speak for themselves, in the most powerful and uniquely personal way. So without much ado I would like to introduce you to a collection of poems by Mr Tom Pickard... otherwise known as Tam O' Red Shirt."
Annie Lennox

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ISBN 0-9746902-2-8
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Some US appearances in 2004 by Tom Pickard:

October 20: Brown University, Providence.
October 22: SUNY-Buffalo.
October 26: Harvard University, Boston.
October 28: University of California, San Diego.
October 30: San Francisco State.
November 4-5th. University of Colorado, Boulder.
November 8: Drake University, Des Moines.
November 9: University of Chicago.
November 10: Woodland Pattern Bookstore, Milwaukee.
November 11: Lake Forest College, Illinois.
November 13: Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Public Library.
November 15: Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
November 17: St. Mark's Poetry Project, New York.
November 18: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.