Play With Me

By Michael Pedersen

The acclaimed Scottish poet’s debut collection shares poems “so physical you can almost touch the images in them. Fabulously sensual and alive.” (Stephen Fry).

Writer and performer Michael Pederson has built a reputation as a critically acclaimed poet-provocateur. His live readings are as memorable as they are witty, laced with an electric energy, as he recites his accessible yet deeply layered poetry from memory.

From NHS overdose clinics to overrun gardens, talking Cambodian treehouses to the teenage perversion of a young Scot on a French Exchange, the poems in Pedersen’s first collection offer a rich and fantastical feast of flavors, landscapes and language. On the menu is everything from iced oysters and chateaubriand to pickled onions and Buckfast-soaked bread sticks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857906205

Michael Pedersen

Michael Pedersen has published two successful chapbooks and an acclaimed debut collection Play with Me (Polygon, 2013). His second collection, Oyster, surfaced in 2017 and was illustrated by – and performed as a live show with – Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison. Pedersen was: named a ‘Canongate Future 40’; a finalist in the 2018 Writer of the Year at the Herald Scottish Culture Awards; awarded the John Mather Trust Rising Star of Literature Award 2014; and won the 2015 Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship – travelling to Grez-sur-Loing in France.  Pedersen also co-runs and co-founded Neu! Reekie! – a prize winning arts collective, known for producing cutting-edge shows all over the globe and hosting take-overs for National Galleries, National Museums and major festivals.

Book preview

I

Colmar

is a matrix of criss-cross canals, capitale des vins d’Alsace,

where, at thirteen, on the school French exchange,

I met Elodie Mullan.

All summer, would insist on cwassonts, slurp expresso

and harshly defame Scotland;

for I knew nothing of our propinquity to the Rhine

or Vosges Mountains, only that Elodie lived a stone’s throw

away, and with craned neck out the attic window

I could see her boodwhar, where there must have been

frequent episodes of nakedness.

Our moments were few: sat side by side on a boat tour;

locked hands walking through a rusting vineyard; were

dancing partners for three songs, linked

together like salted pretzels.

A photograph of us, in partial embrace, reveals Elodie,

alluring as Julie Delpy, me in a Scotland strip

with peroxide-blond hair. The sky, like the shirt,

ultramarine, and me blushing rouge from little-boy syndrome.

I used to dream of returning a celebrity,

with histrionics and extravagance. It would have been

horrendous: white limo, champagne, skunk, one-liners –

a scene from a tawdry hip-hop video.

Nowadays, I’d explain how a poem is like a bomb,

a bomb like a poem; assembled correctly,