About Alone Away

Matt Hetherington is a writer, music-maker, and moderately immoderate self-moderator. He has been writing poetry for over 40 years, and his sixth collection, 'Kaleidoscopes', was published by Recent Work Press in September 2020. Current Inspirations are: raw garlic, vinyl played very loud through big black speakers, and the Corpse Pose.

His new collection is 'About Alone Away' (Walleah Press, December 2024).

This collection is muscular, masculine, carnal, clever and tender; these poems exhibit the false bravado and acute selfreflection of a seeker. In between quirky wordplay, there are tender moments: first childhood love, a teenage kiss, a harsher adult reality. Here is all love's contrariness: he begins with 'middle' poems, has 'ends' in the middle, and 'beginnings' at the end ... perhaps an optimistic plea for mid-life love.

K.A Nelson

We are invited to journey into & through vulnerability, suffocating pain, & a hinted-at redemption. Hetherington's language & imagery ricochets between the quotidian & the surreal & we inhabit the ache, absorb the oscillations of mood & hope, almost taste his pain 'sweet as an orgy of salt'. There's a sense of exorcism, of a scourging self-interrogation, of organising the chaos of loss, and of wrestling demons

into submission, but also a playfulness & wry intelligence underpinning renewal & reinvention: retrieving hope, relearning trust, embracing life, resuscitating love.

Paul Summers