Let's Go Ahead, Then!

By Glenn Telfer

A free ebook selection from the author's previous seven books.

A Scottish mid-century sensibility is brought to the usual suspects; life and love, the past, education, war, being young and getting older.
The author hopes that a lightness of spirit and sense of fun is to be found in the oftentimes sombre topics presented.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenn Telfer
• Release date: Apr 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310671227

Glenn Telfer

I am now almost fully grown, being born in 1956 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland (from Kinning Park, Dennistoun and Ibrox, if you’re asking). The hammer and tongs, coal-powered world I grew up in is as gone as Troy, and with it the industrial working class that served it. What seemed so solid and forever, disappeared almost overnight and is rapidly becoming unknowable except through people like me. The hasty departure of a way of life and its replacement by globalized uncertainty is both the background to my life and the raw material of my art. Considering what’s gone, what’s here, what’s yet to come is what I’m about; itemising the bill of life through my writing. Other poets have explored this too, but none are as like the poet as he is himself. This is my special qualification. Imagine being able to write a book? Even when I was a wee boy throwing stones and playing street football I wanted to be a writer. And all the while I thought I was living my life backwards and sideways I was actually tracing a Celtic knotwork to here. Whatever the reason for this want, this writing may be the cure. May be is also maybe not.

Book preview

SCOTLAND’S SAINT

Glenn Telfer

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…manning the parapet of our wee land, God’s glebe.

SAXON JESUS

Saxon Jesus does not take kindly

to being scorned like other Jesus’s.

Thrashing temple money-lenders

more nails his style,

than turning the other cheek,

except as a mocking challenge

to weak armed practitioners of other gods.

Is that the best you can do?

No wonder your pussy-pawed god

is getting his arse kicked by my father,

right now, as we speak!.

He doesn’t like to hear of working girls

getting dissed either. Another reason

he visits them often and says,

Whosoever among you is without sin

let him be the first to cast a stone.

And he’ll personally have to account to Gabriel, my sword!

What, no ale at the berserker reunion?

Here, gie mi that vat of rain water….

they’re so drunk they’ll not notice the difference.

As he uncorked his godly pintle

and topped it up to a frothing head.

Now, that’s what I call barmy, said