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Dan Wyke
Dan Wyke was born in 1973 and grew up in Cranleigh, Surrey. He spent two years living in Verona and Rome before returning to London to study English at Queen Mary and Westfield. He moved to Brighton in 1996 where he completed an MA in twentieth-century poetry at the University of Sussex. Since then he has divided his time between writing and working part-time. More recently he retrained as a person- centred counsellor. His poetry has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Oxford Poetry, Thumbscrew, The Rialto, The London Magazine, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. A pamphlet, Scattering Ashes, was published by Waterloo Press in 2004. He currently lives in Brighton with his wife and daughter, where he works as a counsellor and manages a rehabilitation project for Age Concern.
| Waiting for the Sky to Fall (2010)
ISBN 978-1-906742-18-8 |
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| Since Scattering Ashes (2004), Dan Wyke — a poet of an increasingly rare breed who prize the privacy of craftsmanship over the publicity of live-lit — has continued writing and publishing through magazines and supplements. This long-anticipated first full volume, Waiting for the Sky to Fall, combines a choice selection of Wyke’s earlier oeuvre with a more protean post-2004 body of work that marks a new tonal variation to an already well-developed voice. Poems such as the lyric-triptych ‘In Verona’ echo formative Italian influences – Montale, Quasimodo, Ungaretti et al. – more intimately, while revealing another fermented quality: poetic humility: ‘There are no words for how I feel./ There still aren’t./ And I still keep trying to find them’. Wyke’s limpid prosody is matched by an ability to tug the heart strings without plunging into sentimentality; momentary frustrations and impasses take on Tulpa-like shapes of their own: ‘My words unravel like thread, snag on the wind’ (‘Father & Son’); ‘Silence sits between us, insect-still’ (the masterly ‘In the Dark’). |  |
Wyke’s humanistic impulse to plumb the nuances of emotion — bereavement, or more inexplicable sadnesses — has a healing spirit, ring-fenced in its own holistic purpose: a reflective voice in a frenetic age. Aspects of contemporary poetics are distilled into something more authentic: prose- inflections are corniced with lyricism; domestic meditations are more Buddhist than quotidian (‘The day.../ ...is extraordinary/ for its ordinariness’); and epiphanies feel serendipitous rather than contrived. An emotional maturation of tones adumbrated in earlier pieces, expressionistic in timbre, fluted with leitmotifs — ‘moons’, ‘stars’, ‘blackbirds’ — is allied with a ripening of trope: ‘heaving its battered shell/ like an old man carrying a bath-tub’ (‘Tortoise’). One could go on, but that would be to spoil the surprises nestled throughout this affecting, moving and highly accomplished collection.
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Scattering Ashes (2004) ISBN 1-902-731-15-8 |
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| Since then, Wyke’s CV has been more than impressive. He was winner of The New Writer poetry competition (1998) and has been published in many anthologies. His poetry magazine credits are legion and include Orbis, Other Poetry, Oxford Poetry, The Reader, The Rialto, Smiths Knoll and Thumbscrew.
Then in 1999 he won an Eric Gregory Award, a prestigious prize for promising poets under the age of 30. It was helpful for providing him with more time to write thanks to a generous grant from the Society of Authors. Obviously this didn’t last forever. For the last eight years he has worked part-time for Age Concern, co-ordinating a Reminiscence Project. Wyke has read at various venues including the Lewes Literature Live Festival and The Open House with The South. Scattering Ashes was third in a series of fourteen Waterloo Press samplers. He was also the featured poet in a recent issue of Staple. |
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'In the Dark' is a tense, primed piece, strikingly focused and unforced - a good example of Dan Wyke at his best. To read extracts please click here |
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