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Look. My second collaboration with Laurie Hastings,
available as a limited-edition set of 6 postcards, each featuring an illustration by Laurie paired with one of my poems.
The cards are beautifully litho printed onto uncoated stock, and each set is bound and editioned out of 1000.
The work concerns people in private dialogue with the spaces around them, whether the enormity of the sea or the
close warmth of a bedroom.
£ 5 + shipping
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This is my first full collection, with fifty-five poems about possibility, survival,
and my obsessive returning to the woods, available from
Two Ravens Press. Excerpt.
OUT OF PRINT
These
are spare, sharply focused poems written with great assurance and control and
an often miraculous clarity, such intent observation that they seem, in Lamb's
phrase, to resolve themselves into the element which they contemplate. [. . .]
These responses
are shaped by underlying tensions, recurring themes of intimacy and unease,
the narrative of a relationship, alluded to, never fully explained. The 'ratty
hems' of willows and 'a sky of cheap beer' reflect a period of depression. 'The
sound of hearing so little/ Of the true sound of this place' makes us aware
of the limitations of human experience. Set against such perceptions are
moments of intense happiness: 'One gull/ sails/ through the morning — a
bright flake of halo', 'this brown-smelling joy, scarcely to be believed.' This is
a poet acutely, almost unbearably alive.
- A. C. Clarke, Edinburgh Review
Descriptively powerful and evocative poems in which the quotidian becomes emblamatic and luminous.
A fine achievement. - Other Poetry
A poetry of watchfulness, of immersion in wilderness and commune with the
wild, David Troupes' fine debut is marked by an intensely focused inquisitiveness,
delineating landscapes, shifting seasons and their creatures in a meticulous,
sparing style, all filtered through a wonderfully lyrical sensibility. - Robert Alan Jamieson
There is a sense, properly veiled,
of the sacred - a sense of wonder, and
mystery too, for these poems don't instantly yield their meanings. Formally
confident, Troupes can pull off both conventional rhymes and unconventional
line-breaks, and execute the most startling of shifts with his deft similes. - Ken Cockburn
[Troupes] achieves maximum effect with a minimum of words. - Gutter
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A chamber opera for which I wrote the libretto, with music by Joel Rust. Nauset was performed in the Chapel of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 4 & 5 February 2011, conducted by Christopher Stark and featuring Louise Kemeny,
Joanna Songi and Edward Leach. A recording of the first night's
performance is available for free listening.
For the short opera is much like a dream. It is comprised of separate, timeless vignettes, set to slow breathed music of
great frailty. We hear three songs by three different characters: a daughter, a wife and a father. Each discusses the
father's obsession with the sea and suggested drowning, and it is their nuanced emotional responses that form the
content of the opera. [. . .] David Troupes's libretto was striking, combining intense, often obscure, imagery with
vernacular phrases like 'eels in a stew' to great effect. - Joe Bates, Cambridge Tab
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A simple folded pamphlet,
available from Knucker Press.
Excerpt.
A woman, about whom we know nothing except that she is walking in late autumn, passes a scarecrow. In a sequence of ten
short poems, a world in decline is evoked exactly by a mind attentive to beauty, bleakness and fragility, as Troupes sets
growth against decay, order against chaos, life against death. Written in loose yet disciplined couplets with flair and
precision, there is a sense both of intimate involvement and utter detachment, encompassing the essential delight and
terror we feel when we engage deeply with the natural world. This simplest of journeys becomes both Eden and Apocalypse.
- Ken Cockburn
Also from Knucker is the multi-poet and photography collection Booklight, which contains six of my poems, three of which were not collected into Parsimony.
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