the terrible

By Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman's bleak brilliance in the terrible is a masterclass in the power of poetry to confront difficult subject matter with accuracy and painstaking openness. These are rigorous and exacting poems, that dare to go to some of the darkest places and speak with stark precision.
These poems may be stripped down, intense and utterly frank, but they are not without deep reserves of sincerity and beauty. Sluman writes of the heady cocktail of being alive, where loss, love, sex, close shaves with mortality and sharp narratives of pain and suffering are explored with concise and humane clarity.
"Daniel Sluman's new collection explores acute and chronic, emotional and physical pain (and, albeit less often, pleasure) with a raw, compelling urgency. At times playful, at times harrowing, the terrible always brims with life." – Carrie Etter
"Vivid and honest poems of intense experience, in which no wound is too deep to be cauterised by language. " – Jean Sprackland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911027508

Daniel Sluman

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. His second collection 'the terrible' was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015. He has appeared widely in UK poetry journals and his third collection, ‘single window’, about living with disability and chronic pain, is published by Nine Arches Press in September 2021.

Book preview

every window in the world slams shut

human/beauty

the first thing you taste

is the sweat & bleach

of human delivery

the story of life

is always the thing

& something to wash

away its stain    each year

a step you tumble down

falling apart a little more

how time drags you

by the ankles so slowly

through the grass

you watch it all pass

the expectant faces

of the people you love

slipping into the dark

you clutch at weeds

but nothing will grip

& in the end    like us all

you fall into the cold

black earth    every window

in the world slams shut

1991-2006

my father’s pounded blue ford

& my feet barely glancing the receipts

& marlboro cartons piled on the floor

the strips of paintwork    peeling empty promises

from neon signs    the city’s yellow horizon

a pair of hands    composing the softly-lit dreams

of businessmen in hotel rooms    screwing

silk ties in their worn palms     their heads

full of yes     each night a heaved dice

& we’re driving further through it each year

my toes starting to plant the mat    your hair

greying in the rear-view mirror    the faces

from our life    passing    like boarded-up doors

ouija

for as long as I remember I never wanted

what I had    the half-read books cluttered

in piles    the guitar’s strings ruined to dust

I’ve always been dirty    tobacco wedged

under nails    the shock of snowflakes shook

from scalp to shoulders    I’d never seen

someone like me stride from