ISBN: 978-1-915108-42-5
Published 1 May 2026
62 pages
"Andy Jackson’s sixth full collection begins with an electrifying, playlist-inspired sonnet crown, and goes on to feature a luminous cast of musicians, singers, sportspeople, and entertainers – some famous, others almost forgotten. Behind it all, the poems reflect on dream and reality, the uncertain present and its possible future, living bodies and dead spirits, what is and what might have been. Even a poem itself could turn out to be only 'the simulacrum of the one I should have written'."
*
Two Film Poems (YouTube links):
Some Kind of a Man
*
Elegy For a Haunted Man
‘Hauntology is founded on a belief that even that which does not exist physically or currently can still leave impressions on the present’. —Paige Allen ‘What Is Hauntology?’, 2023
I used to know my pockets so well – wrappers
for sucked sweets, blown tresses of paper hankies –
but today I pulled out keys for a car long-sold,
a blister pack of pills in duck-egg blue, one cold
coin withdrawn from circulation in the eighties.
I wonder whose these are, and why it matters.
The old radio retuned itself this afternoon, fading
out a singalong, piping in a chorus flecked with age,
a song I’d never heard yet found myself humming.
I sat down to a late meal. It tasted of something
sharp which I’m sure I didn’t add – tarragon, sage?
I pray my tongue is more than what it’s tasting.
I’ve been advised to keep a diary. It’s in a drawer
that trembles with the smell of lipstick, the myth
of faces I used to read. I mark this page with a hair.
Tonight, my footsteps sounded strange on the stair.
The clocks go back again; the third time this month,
but I’ve forgotten what it is I’m saving daylight for.
*
“Pyrotechnics of wit and formal invention laced with shots of melancholia disguised as jokes but funny all the same, gathering together former disco hits disguised as sonnets, and highlights of sports and music hall bathed in fatalism all delivered with clownish virtuosic grace.” —George Szirtes
“With brisk elegance, Andy Jackson’s poems deploy a metaphysical wit to dramatize the great themes of time, decay and the urge to preserve. His explorations of popular culture (Donna Summer and Kraftwerk), or its precursor the music-hall (the comic titan Jimmy James) draw on a connoisseur’s rich resources, while his interest in stage illusion recalls Michael Donaghy. There are some very funny yet inescapably melancholy poems here. And the cleanliness of Jackson’s sentence construction is a refreshment in itself.” —Sean O’Brien
Disco Biscuits by Andy Jackson
Hat
I long to write myself a hat; one
that sits at its own best angle,that keeps its brightest fabric
for the inside, that raises metaller by wearing, that lays down
a shadow wider than its brim.*
No UFOs
Not weather balloons, lenticular clouds
or headlights from a lonely car, refracted
by a sugaring of hoar frost. That loud
report must be alien, not protracted
backfire of a failed engine, or the boom
of bombers in some simulated war.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Doom
smooths the kinks in what we think we saw,
mass hallucinations or hysteria.
We’re not convinced – we never are – but we
would have to speak to his superior,
fill in the forms and wait a year or three.
There’s no evidence time can’t discredit,
no smoking pistol, no proof we said it.
Andy Jackson is the author of five previous poetry collections, including A Beginner’s Guide to Cheating (Red Squirrel Press, 2015) and The Saints Are Coming (Blue Diode, 2020). His latest publication Selling the Light (Whaleback City Press, 2025) is a collaboration with Italian photographer Catia Montagna. He has edited several poetry anthologies, including Split Screen/Double Bill (both Red Squirrel Press, 2012/2014) and Scotia Extremis with Brian Johnstone (Luath, 2019). He co-hosts the New Boots and Pantisocracies blog with poet W. N. Herbert, as well as several other web-based poetry activities, including Project Abeona and Otwituaries. He was Makar to the Federation of Writers Scotland in 2017 and also coordinates the Lonely Funeral project (with Michael Hannah) in Dundee.
