Wonderful E-Book

Harry Baker

• Herausgeber: Burning Eye Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 72

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker's latest collection is his most ambitious yet. Following on from the success of Unashamed (Burning Eye, 2022), Harry Baker combines the insight of a mathematician and the vulnerability of the poet to find wonder in the little things that make life so precious. From a poem about wellies becoming an exploration of masculinity, a poem planning his own funeral inspiring thousands around the world to do the same, or a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer literally just being a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer, The combination of grief and joy in recent poems has led to Harry being described as the Barbenheimer of the poetry world (by himself, but he is hoping it catches on).

Leseprobe

Contents

Praise for Harry Baker

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Intro

New book, new me, right?

20 Achievable New Year’s Resolutions

A Chance to Look Forward

Things That Bring Me Joy

One Thing

Wellies

Things That Bring Me Joy ii

One of the ways I got into writing

Schöfferhofer Life

Things That Bring Me Joy iii

A univocalic is a type of constrained writing

Ingrid

Things That Bring Me Joy iv

While most of what I write is to be shared on stage

As

Things That Bring Me Joy v

My Favourite Commission

An Ode to Postcodes

Things That Bring Me Joy vi

What I Love About Poetry

A Refugee Is

Things That Bring Me Joy vii

Home

Things That Bring Me Joy viii

Finishing my last book

Things I Learnt from Interrailing

Things That Bring Me Joy ix

One of the joys of going away is coming home.

A Bed Shop Called Dreamland

Things That Bring Me Joy x

From one of the quickest

Trying

Things That Bring Me Joy xi

Something else that is happening

Sunflowers

Things That Bring Me Joy xii

This next poem started out life as an anniversary poem

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Things That Bring Me Joy xiii

Before I had even written the first word of this book

Things That Bring Me Joy xiv

At the time of writing

Wonderful

Acknowledgements

About Harry Baker

Copyright

Praise for Harry Baker

Harry Baker’s way with words is entirely fascinating. His mathematical genius meets with the wonder of a golden retriever let loose on the beach and creates poetry which is completely unique, never clichéd and always guaranteed to take you on a personal journey. Only he can make wellies a metaphor for living life bravely yet openly flawed. His ability to see through to the very bones of life using the most random subject matters as a starting point, is mesmerising to me. This book will make you smile, laugh, cry and most importantly read things twice and twice again, to better feel the many meanings of his deep-dives into the soul. He also gives much insight into the art of creating poetry, lifting the curtain a little for the curious to learn more. A triumph Harry! An absolute glitterball, party buffet, plethora of a poetry and prose picnic. Do yourself a favour; purchase this book, then seek out Harry reciting his words, for that is when the magic really truly happens. 

Donna Ashworth

Title Page

Wonderful

Harry Baker

Burning Eye

Dedication

For Little Star.

I’m so excited for all of it.

Epigraph

The object isn’t to make art. It’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Robert Henri

Intro

How long does it take to write a poem?

This is one of the most common questions I am asked when I do school visits, along with What is your favourite dinosaur? and Are you famous?1 I feel myself going into autopilot with my answer, saying that some poems come very quickly and feel very exciting, whereas some poems take a lot longer and have to be chipped away at, but that on average it’s probably a month or two from that initial spark to something that I feel ready to share with people. At which point they gasp because, I assume, they have only been alive for a couple of months themselves, so that feels like a very long time.

I go on to tell them it’s a bit like a musical instrument or a sport where the more you practise, the easier it gets. I then often lead a writing workshop where I give them about fifteen minutes to come up with something new, which in the context of the above doesn’t feel very fair at all.

While all of this is true, an equally honest answer would be I don’t know. My first book of poems, The Sunshine Kid, came out when I was twenty-two years old. It was everything I had ever written up to that point and it coincided with me deciding I was going to be a full-time poet, which was exhilarating and terrifying and liberating and paralysing, and I had no idea what that actually looked like (spoiler alert: it’s the second-best decision I ever made). It took me eight years to put together my second collection Unashamed, and it will have been just under two years from that being released to this little baby coming out. By this logic it will be six months before Book Four hits the shelves and you’ll have just over seventeen hours to read Book Seven before the next one is on its way, which to be honest is quite stressful to even joke about.

But I have been practising. As much as I think every writer aspires to improve on a technical level, (and poems such as ‘Ingrid’ show I am as obsessed as I have ever been on that front), the thing I have really been putting the hours into is cultivating my sense of wonder. To not just be amazing but to be amazed. From the very direct action of documenting small things that bring me joy to the more unexpected challenge of finding the glory of God in postcodes, it is this intangible sense of awe and wonder that may not have modules dedicated to it in poetry courses, but that I believe is as urgent and necessary and worth investing in as any literary technique I have ever come across.

The other reason I believe this collection came together quicker than the last book is that I no longer need every poem to do all of the things all of the time. Gone are the days of three-minute poetry slams where everything I wrote wanted to be a bit funny, a bit clever, a bit meaningful and then a bit judged at the end of it. Each of the poems in this book has been given enough space to be exactly what it needs to be, and as a result it includes some of my favourite (and most varied!) work to date. From language nerds to pudding enthusiasts, I hope there is something for everyone, and more importantly I hope there is something for you. Perhaps it will inspire you to try to write your own poems, plan your own funeral, or just buy some new wellies. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to practise seeing the world with a bit more wonder. In the meantime, I am off to get to work on the next one.

New book, new me, right?

New book, new me, right?

I love the ritual of a new year. A chance to look back and look forward. In recent years I have skipped the more specific resolutions to go for one overall vibe to guide the year by. Previous mantras include Let Harry Be Harry, Do More Cool Stuff and Look After Your Big Rocks.2 This year’s mantra was the slightly bolder Be a Legend and Have a Great Time, and, I’ll be honest, the fact that you are holding this book in your hands is as great and legendary as it gets for me.

Despite this well-trodden path of not setting myself up for disappointment by keeping things nice and vague, last year I also made the mistake of adding in two ridiculously specific (and specifically ridiculous) new year’s resolutions that then failed spectacularly. The first was to do a 5 km run the first week of the year (so far, so good) and then add 1 km every week (uh-oh) so that by the end of the year I would be able to run 57 km without even thinking about it. This was going surprisingly well until, at the end of a 39 km run in September, I injured my leg so badly I could no longer walk, let alone run. A planned weekend in the Lake District with friends soon became a trip to a garden centre so I could hire a mobility scooter and pretend I was in Mario Kart.

The second putting-the-mental-in-incremental resolution was borrowed from my dear friend Chris, who decided he would try to do one press-up on the first day of the year (so far, so good) and then add an additional press-up each day (here we go again) until he could do 365 on December 31st, presumably at the same time as I was running the equivalent of twelve laps of Hyde Park. I was so inspired by this mathematical madness that I thought I would attempt exactly the same thing, with the added twist that I wouldn’t tell my wife Grace about it, and then one day she would turn around and be surprised by how unbelievably hench I had got, at which point I would reveal all. What could possibly go wrong?