Kitchen, 12.07 a.m.

Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., is Julian Flanagan’s second collection. Many first appeared in magazines such as The Spectator, Ambit, The Rialto, The Reader, Envoi, Iota, and The Manchester Review. His poems have been short-listed in the Teignmouth Festival and Plough Poetry Prizes.

Mario Petrucci described Flanagan’s first collection as “Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks and looks again…it refuses to flinch.” (Although Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., comes cancer-free.)

His poems can be pithy -

                        Apart

We tap text, puncture separation

with a line of drill heads: xxxxx

- celebratory, or elegiac. Preacher-haunted motorways lie beside sleeping Queen bees waiting to govern; a baby struggles through her first breaths; the Tardis jumps a middle-aged man back to his Cheshire childhood; a lawnmower cuts the air in a Jamaican stairwell; a boiler ticks reassuringly through the small hours.