Ian Gouge - Selected Poems (1976 - 2022)

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At a recent reading event, I was asked which of my collections was my 'best book'. It was an innocent enough question, designed to aid a purchasing decision. It was also an unfair question. Any marginal preference I may have for one or the other is inevitably dwarfed by the knowledge that there are good pieces in all my volumes of poetry and that, in expressing a preference, a potential reader will always be in danger of missing out on something I would like to think 'worthy'. Yet you can't expect your average reader to buy all your books! For a while I had been toying with the idea of pulling together a 'selected works', gathering all my favourite poems under a single cover. This notion had been growing in strength partly as a result of more regular attendance of 'open mics' at which I sometimes struggled to decide what to read, wouldn't it be rewarding to be able to take a single book to such events knowing every piece inside was a live candidate? On the back of that ambition, the 'best book' question only added fuel to the fire. So here it is, a 'Greatest Hits' from my seven collections published to-date. And, because I couldn't help myself, I have thrown in a small number of as yet unseen poems. Of course, I should also say that this endeavour in no way diminishes the value of the individual books themselves, there are many more poems that might easily have found their way into this volume had size not been a consideration.