Winner of Poetry Debut collection of the year, Scottish National Book Awards, 2025
Published on 11 February 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915108-26-5
"In terms of overarching themes, Good Sons explores landscape and place, mental health and familial relationships. With my background in neuroscience, I’m particularly interested in the intersection of physiology, psychiatry and personal perception – how the mind and body influence the realities we construct for ourselves. These ideas subtly underpin much of the collection." - Tim Craven, interview, as the Scottish Book Trust's Book of the Month
Peafowl
We turn right off the expressway
past Mt. Bonnell and into someone else’s heaven:
a small patch of Texas filled with Indian peacocks.
I grew up where the promise of peacocks
unravelled on a school outing
somewhere in Staffordshire; a solitary tattered thing
plucking bare its dulled rainbow of plumage.
But this – this electric muster of birds,
dozens of them roaming the ornamental garden,
crowding the parking lot, calls fat with menace,
voices as malformed as their tails are beautiful.
Two perch upon the roof of the little tearoom.
Another blocks the entrance gate,
its feathers fully fanned like a deck of cards,
a hundred cobalt eyes boring into us.
It steals the sunlight for its own resplendence,
and in the shade left behind
a cluster of plain brown peahens console one another.
We’ve come here to lift A’s spirits;
she’s been passed over for a small promotion.
Nothing that will register in a week or two
but today she is stung, and it has left me stung too,
which I think might be a circle closer to love’s core.
*
“Tim Craven is a poet of astonishing range and audacity who tackles issues of mental health, belonging, and identity with ingenious candour. He’s an utterly original voice for our times – welcome and essential.” –John Glenday
“The pleasures of Tim Craven’s book are manifold. Pleasure of intensities, pleasure of intimacies, pleasure in the ‘slant wiring’ and the open, ‘armourless’ forays into the fallen world. It is disarming in its crush of the particulars. It is startling in its expansiveness. It’s as if a forensic approach to experience will yield the soul. It’s got brainy architecture but also smart brick work and electrical engineering. Shatter rhymes with matter, evidence with brilliance. He does what good poets do, from ‘donuts, or elephants, or music’ he manufactures wonder. An impressive, notable debut.” –Bruce Smith
“Widely travelled in both geographical and disciplinary – not to mention emotional – terms, these are poems which, while they often celebrate and probe the small, the earthy, the ordinary, have their noses trained always on the elusive spoor of ‘the centre of things’. A meditative poet who works his way with careful honesty and linguistic verve through complex ideas, Craven can shift from comic to devastating on a sixpence, can upend, within a single image, the microworld of his reader’s consciousness. ‘all the fertility and futility/ is right here … the celestial,/ the microscopic’. Good Sons is spilling over with swag; it announces the arrival of a distinctive and capacious talent.” –Miriam Gamble
