Crazy Days

By Carole Coates
ISBN 978-0-9928946-4-1
Price £5

Out of Stock

When her life was inexplicably thrown into turmoil, Carole Coates had both the presence of mind and the skill to record the experience and in so doing has produced beautiful examples of how personal difficulty can transform itself into art. With candour, compassion and wit, her common-sense and intimately pitched voice manages to convey, in a deeply affecting way, the confusion and pathos of the situation she and her husband struggled with.

‘These are well crafted, tender poems, whose long lines hint at runaway thoughts that sometimes seem on the verge of getting out of control. You should buy the book to allow Coates to tell you the whole story – including its ending.’ Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, londongrip.

Carole reads two poems from Crazy Days here:https://youtu.be/iXOT1Shqgt4


Crazy Days 8

When your clever doctor friend told me
you might have Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease
those were the only words
that I could say: Creutzfeldt Jakob
until those jagged unkind syllables
became a place –

a featureless dark plain
continent-wide and no-one there but us,
the two of us, with not a tree, just earth
so flat – so flat
sucked down from underneath, it seemed,
by unappeasable great appetites.

I remembered a woman I knew once
who refused all other mourners
at her husband’s grave.
There were the two of us, she said
and sat in the church alone.
It stayed with me:
that there were two of them and then just one.


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