You never told me how boring it is to be mad
with you it was always gin and parties
and the solar radio, that remembered
its songs with the sunrise...

from ‘Eurydice’

‘The only end of writing,’ Dr Johnson said, ‘is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Misprint offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently ‘real’ virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. ‘Eurydice’, the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together.

We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: ‘I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.’


'James Womack is another bright young poet... he is capable of lugubrious comic inventions such as 'From the Literary Encyclopaedia', which charts an experimental novelist's doomed career, alongside 'Tourism', a clipped and chilly poem about the export of jihadis to the Middle East... on the evidence of Misprint Womack has scope, curiosity and a refreshing sense of not having foresuffered everything he encounters.'
Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times

‘Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist... Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that’s ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious. ’
Heidi Williamson, Eyewear

From a Notebook    
The Thing    
The Water Cycle: Variations on a Theme    
Halfway through the A-Feature
Internet Poems    
Young Romance    
Three Epigrams    
The Underworld    
Ariadne    
Tourism    
Little Red Poem    
Fish    
The Dogs of a House in Mourning and the Naked Girl    
Master Chuang    
Found Poem: President’s Reminiscences Read Widely    
Property    
Maisky Poems    
Vomit    
Likeness    
Experiment    
Foiled again…    
Criticism    
The True Scholar    
from The Literary Encyclopaedia    
Dark and stormys    
Mosaic    
Now, / A / Poem / That is Called / ‘Of Insomnia’    
Misprint    

Eurydice
1    Was it that long ago you died?    
2    Pray for us sinners, that we have climbed    
3    The shutters falling    
4    After, it is you who lie in the hollow of my elbow    
5    Slowly and patiently we have forgotten it all    
6    You never told me how boring it is to be mad    
7    Leaving the bright town to the desert    
8    A garden, as a child might draw it    
9    I wrote to you last March in Madrid    
10    Thick fog. I walked down the way of all flesh    
11    Your smile fades and the garden is now dark    
12    Death is not the end; some doors are never fully closed    
Coda    With two bags where his two hands were    

Notes