What Possessed Me
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Winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, Wales Books of the Year 2017
Evoking childhood memories and lifelong relationships with humour, poignancy, and preternatural clarity, What Possessed Me also explores the natural world and landscapes in various parts of England, Wales, France, and Greece. There are salutes to writers like Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and Jack Gilbert. Separate sequences celebrate visits to Llandaff Cathedral, and the revelations of a stay in Athens. This is a book diverse in its moods and subjects but unified by an infectious openness to the moment and to life’s joys and sorrows, and an unfolding sense of accumulating experience and insight. It is illuminated by a recurrent sense of inspiration, of ‘what possessed me.’
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Evoking childhood memories and lifelong relationships with humour, poignancy, and preternatural clarity, What Possessed Me also explores the natural world and landscapes in various parts of England, Wales, France, and Greece. There are salutes to writers like Edward Thomas, Dannie Abse and Jack Gilbert. Separate sequences celebrate visits to Llandaff Cathedral, and the revelations of a stay in Athens. This is a book diverse in its moods and subjects but unified by an infectious openness to the moment and to life’s joys and sorrows, and an unfolding sense of accumulating experience and insight. It is illuminated by a recurrent sense of inspiration, of ‘what possessed me.’
Space Travellers
Ben and Eleanor live in Hinckley now.
Unexpectedly, like visitors from Mars,
they showed up at the door yesterday,
the third Saturday in January,
and sat with us in the warm living room
drinking tea and eating shortcake biscuits
from the tin they had given us for Christmas.
I kept looking at them, large as life, solid,
there in front of us, talking in those voices
that are so familiar, not heard for weeks.
The cold gets in to all kinds of gloves, Ben said,
it will always find a way. When they’d arrived
we’d shaken hands and his had been like ice.
I photographed them as they rode off, waving,
on their brand new bike, all very smart,
distanced inside their astronaut helmets
in the clear but fading late afternoon.
The forecast was frost, and it didn’t lie.
At ten they called to tell us they had landed.
Published: 23 September 2016
ISBN: 978-1905208364
Pages: 100
“Full of precise and telling detail and powerful and memorable imagery.”
Jonathan Edwards
“The clarity of perception that we have come to expect and treasure…”
John Lavin
“What matters to Freeman… is perception itself and the possibility of founding meaning about the world in that perception. But there is also a great sense of fun in the poems. He is good and stimulating company, and more readers should get to know him.”
David Clarke, A Thing for Poetry. Read a fuller review here.
“The thing that immediately strikes me about John Freeman’s poems is their consistency – of tone, of rhythm, of clarity. There is a sure voice in evidence at all times. What is particularly affecting is the way in which a poem, and I’m conscious of this whole book being, in a sense, really one poem, can be triggered by a small incident or observation. What I find attractive in the writing is the relaxed and friendly way in which the reader is invited into the poet’s world.”
Charles Ashleigh, Penniless Press. Read the full review here.
“What Possessed Me is a visionary collection. There are shadows as well as light but there is an overwhelming sense of transformation and the connection of things in the ‘undeniable/fellowship, whatever it means, of being.’ (‘Morning in the Parc Lefèvre’).”
Mandy Pannett, Sentinel Literary Quarterly. Read the full review in the online version here.
John Freeman was born in Essex, grew up in south London, studied in Cambridge and lived in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where for many years he taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan. Worple published A Suite for Summer in 2007, followed in 2016 by What Possessed Me, which won the Roland Matthias Award and the poetry section of the Wales Book of the Year awards in 2017. Other collections include The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride), and Landscape With Portraits (Redbeck). Stride also published a book of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets.
