ISBN 978-1-909404-11-3
£7.95 88 pages pur bound
“Roger Elkin’s Chance Meetings is a wide ranging collection with an overview of many countries and cultures. There are four sections covering the travels and each one offers a different stylistic stance although all share similar authorial values with their sense of beauty, transience and waste.
These are poems for those who seek wider horizons – poetic as well as physical and spiritual. Read and appreciate the variety, richness and skill of them in language used at its best, and honed to perfection with the sheer joy of its range and nuances, and then go and see for yourselves the worlds and values they explore.”
Mandy Pannett
Other voices on Roger Elkin’s previous collection Marking Time, (2013):
“Like all the best poetry, it affects the way its reader thinks. … Opens new vistas on life … and the whole human condition.”
Alison Chisholm
“A work of considerable maturity and vision, its success measured by the powerful … intricate and crafted phrasing … This is a big and important book.”
Will Daunt, Envoi
“Roger Elkin’s poems burst with sharply observed and well-chosen detail, and are simply very interesting.”
Don Paterson
Sample poem:
Jeep Safari, Night Sitting
We’re out in the safari jeep
ten of us, game-spotters,
under the vast canopy
of the southern night sky,
stars scattered like salt
from heaven’s salt-mill.
Trevor has the lamp,
arcing it over St. Lucia’s Wetlands Park
in pans of light – grey-green pools at distance –
that ghost over foliage and brush up against
the treeline, the grass clumps,
cut-down pine-tree stumps,
the safari palms
trying to find sightings –
rhino, nightjar, kudu,
bush buck, duiker, buffalo –
in fact, anything we may or may not already have seen.
Isolated in seas of darkness
save where Trevor’s lamp invades,
pins of light wink, blinking back.
There’s a clear division in the darkness,
ebony brushed by the moon,
and though no ground is being given,
nothing substantial gained,
the motion is being carried.
The parliament of animals have decided
the eyes have it.
(And keep it tonight they will …)
Roger Elkin
