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Woodland Pattern™    Book   Center		Tom Pickard Tom Pickard was born in Newcastle in 1946, left school at 14, and in 1964 co-organized the Morden Tower poetry readings, "a Golden Bloomsday for the revival of British poetry in the 60s". Called "the lyrical post-beat enfant terrible of the alternative poetry scene in 60s/70s UK," he is credited with encouraging the British poet Basil Bunting to begin writing again. Pickard was a great supporter of American experimental poetry, and gained a reputation as something of an ally among such poets as Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson. Pickard's most recent offerings, Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems and The Dark Months of May were published by Flood Editions in 2002 and 2004 respectively. In part a chronicle of misfortune and heartbreak, The Dark Months of May tells of life on the run. With his characteristic bawdiness and sonic aplomb, Pickard seeks refuge in the geography of British border ballads, accompanied by eighteenth-century horse thieves and 'desperate reprobates.'

In Paradise Tom Pickard

in paradise I was ordered to improvise confident of my co-operation they paid in advance it's the only sweatshop in town with a vacancy

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there is something so familiar in what is said I stop and listen, a traveller's monologue of dark moaning trees, chopped waters, deserted street corners, randomly disturbed light, raised curtains, doors flung open, sudden precipitous avenues, far away dogs brought near it is insistent secures my inner ear we pick up the old conversation neither of us understands

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