... brings together more than 200 pages of poems, prose pieces, collages and manifesto-statements written since the 1960s. It is a furious, funny and brave book of great poems on huge subjects - William Carlos Williams meets Brecht with a Glasgow accent. Leonard writes for all those who have been told they live "outside the narrative," who are made to feel like "foreigners on their native soil." Andy Croft - Morning Star
outside the narrative publishes the great majority of Tom Leonard's poetry to date with prose pieces such as Honest and A Night at the Pictures. Amongst previously uncollected new work is the sequence An Ayrshire Mother in memory of the poet’s mother: Tom Leonard describes this as "ordinary everyday flowers from her own mouth laid before a final constructed metaphor of a tombstone."
The book concludes with the poem below:
A Life
There were some who seemed to spend their lives “being a writer”.
And he had spent his life not being a writer.
That way lay safety. An invisibility. A freedom.
Those he met saw him as “that writer” and would never understand that this
was not how he had chosen to see himself.
He accepted their seeing him as “that writer” almost with a kind of irony.
But then he began to accept that he was a writer.
It was a matter of language and consciousness. The link between the two.
He had to choose to accept the responsibility of the outer that he had preserved
from himself, that he had left to the perception of others.
For as he grew older he stood in a separate relationship to himself.
He was able to body himself conceptually as a totality.
And though he had never been a storyteller, he saw that he had been telling a
story all his life.
It became important to him that somebody heard the story, now that he realised
he had been telling it.
Yet all that remained to be told was that he had been telling it.
And all that remained was the need for the last understanding, the sign that
someone had heard the story, and the teller was no longer necessary.
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The Guardian review of the book can be read in two parts here and here
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