The Bright Tethers: Poems 1988-2016 by David Cameron

The Bright Tethers: Poems 1988-2016 by David Cameron Format: Paperback Pages: 336 Publication: August 2016 ISBN: 9780957466968 This 2016 volume was award-winning poet David Cameron’s first-ever collection of poetry – and a major collection at that, spanning four decades of work. It was chosen as one of the Sunday Herald’s Books of the Year by Ron Butlin, who wrote: ‘David Cameron’s The Bright Tethers confirms him as one of the most insightful and thought-provoking poets around.’ Seamus Heaney had earlier written appreciatively of Cameron’s poetry that it ‘provides an answer to Frost’s wish for poems about subjects common in experience but rare in books’. Night Singing There comes a time in singing to a child, As the small limbs go limp and the breaths deepen, That you become aware of weight. It’s then You hear your voice, and in it something wild. Why do fears come? Nothing on any shelf Can tell you in this place of simple rhyme. The child’s asleep, and has been for some time. You’re only singing now to soothe yourself. David Cameron David Cameron was born in Glasgow in 1966 and now lives near Belfast. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry. He is the author of four books of fiction, three books of poetry, and a critical study of Samuel Beckett. The poet and critic Robert Nye described Cameron’s writing as possessing ‘a quality of verbal alchemy by which it transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold’. Several of his poems have been set to music by the composer David Jaeger. Introduction to The Bright Tethers