Up Beat Down by Danny Gray

ISBN 978-1-326-93582-5

Perfect bound paperback book, 99 Pages

Print Book: A5 (5.83 x 8.27 in / 148 x 210 mm).

Up Beat Down is a worthy successor to the earlier volume Beat Dimensions. It contains Cat In The Sack, Danny’s first real attempt at spontaneous rhyme, and many more which have been fired by a burst of inspiration, such as a phrase or a newspaper article. Some poems were influenced by the brilliance of John Cooper Clarke, who’s voice Danny could hear as he worked. There’s social observation here, a kitchen sink visit to reality, twenty-twenty-four style, with an emphasis on authenticity rather than what might be presented by the mainstream media. You’ll be taken to Paris, to a tourist landmark, but you won’t see it like you would in the brochure. You’ll go to a traditional English pub but it won’t be a picture postcard. You’ll encounter contemporary mores, contemporary bores, the trend for home deliveries and dialling a ride, the lives that are lived beneath a major flight path, a world where the use of AI is taking over. But there are contemporary inspirations as well. You’ll sing to these melodies. You’ll hear what spurs the muse, where it can take you if you write for yourself and don’t worry about restrictions. In the world unseen by the mainstream, you’ll feel the pulse of the imagination, the beat, the bebop, the soul. You’ll be taken to Soho, to the land of the absolute beginner, the home of the hip, you’ll touch the creases of the cloth, meet the hedonistic delights that take you to the moon and back. It’s all there in a phrase, a moment of truth that you will recognise, whether you knew it before or not. There are nods to modernism, art, culture, music. You’ll visit subculture, eighteenth century style. You’ll find a oneness with nature. There will be descriptions of reality, from the gentle pursuit of angling, so real in fact that you could almost be there, to the pleasures of plonk. There are personal recollections, innermost memories. Fears coming alive in the corridors of nightmares. The underclass personified in the decline of small towns. The blight of waste products littering the urban landscape. This is a book that brings Modernist Beat Poetry into the spotlight. As writer Jason Brummell says you need to , "Dig it and Dig in!"

Cover art by Graeme Webb

Foreword by Rob Massey