Poor Queen

by Mab Jones

Post-modern, political, and bawdy, Poor Queen is packed with dark humour. Mab Jones is a popular performer across the UK, gracing the stage of pub, club, theatre and festival tent. She projects the frustrations of ordinary people and everyday life in a straight talking rhythmic blast of comic poetry.

“A superb performance poet in the tradition of Joolz Denby and Pam Ayres”
Phill Jupitus

“Poor Queen Mab? Shelley some mistake. Lovely person, great poet, Wales should be proud of her.”
Attila the Stockbroker

“Mab Jones is a whirlwind of controlled, lyrical delirium. Her work is smart and funny, saturated with meaning.”
Literary Death Match, USA

“Witty verse telling of lively working-class scenarios.”
Kerrang! Radio

“A unique talent.”
The Times

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published August 14, 2014

About the author

Mab Jones is a "unique talent" (The Times). She has read her poems all over the UK, in the US, Ireland, France, and Japan; at festivals such as Green Man and Latitude; on BBC Radio 4; and supporting television's Phill Jupitus at the Edinburgh Fringe. She was the first Resident Poet in the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and has also been Resident Writer at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse. She is the winner of many awards and accolades, including the John Tripp Spoken Poetry Audience Prize, the Neil Gaiman Word Factory Short Story Competition, and the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. She was the recent recipient of a Creative Wales Award, and her second collection, take your experience and peel it (Indigo Dreams, 2016) was winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize.

Her first collection, Poor Queen, was published by Burning Eye Books. She has also been published in various newspapers and journals e.g. the Spectator; has appeared on Made in Cardiff TV; is the founder editor of Black Sheep; has blogged for Mslexia magazine; and organises events, which have included the first Welsh editions of Pecha Kucha Night (from Japan), Literary Death Match (from the US), 100,000 Poets for Change (worldwide), UK Slam! Championships (London) and more. Currently, Mab runs International Dylan Thomas Day, is a freelance writer for the New York Times, and teaches at Cardiff University.

@mabjones
http://mabjones.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mabjones

Reviews

[Maxine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poor Queen by Mab Jones

If you thought poetry wasn't for you, this book will change your mind. Most people find their way into poetry through listening to it. Mab Jones is a wonderful performance poet, and Poor Queen is a great selection from her repertoire. She is a comic poem in the tradition of Pam Ayres. I'm not the first to make this comparison, and Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Tits is in the style of Pam Ayres's poem about teeth.

The subjects can be racy: tits, sex, body hair, drugs, and innocence sullied. She infuses politics, sexuality and love of a passionate and dangerous kind.

Commenting on class politics, the writer speaks with affection and teasing of the lower working classes. In the first of two linked poems, Working Class Heaven is a buffet of lambrini and sausage rolls, and Working Class Hell is expressed in the lack of their familiar comforts: no Elizabeth Duke, no Aldis; instead, horror, there's poetry and jasmine tea. She's partly tongue in cheek, in the way that Freud says in every joke there's truth. Her class politics is not one of my experience, and so the working classes of Mab's observations seem to be more of the wife-beating, drug-taking Uttermenshe underclass rather than the working classes who, well, work.

The poems of this book hail from the performance stage with rhyme and rhythm that pleases. And the cheerful nursery rhyme rhythm is often at odds with the subject matter - such as Judas Priest, in which the priest takes his deprived sexual appetites out on his young congregation.

Particular favourites are Xmas Time (after John Cooper Clarke) - one to read on Christmas Day with the family "It's f*cking Christmas time." And Millionaire: "I love you because you choose millionaire's shortbread from the café counter, and we both know you will never be a millionaire." It describes the small-big things that makes you love a man all the more, and in the midst of Mab's observations on society and her dark humour, the full beam of love shining through the poems gives hope.

[Johnny Giles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disagree with previous review - the title poem itself 'punches up', mocking the monarch. Whilst these poems are performance pieces they also work on the page and retain their bleak humour. The author herself comes from a working class background so it would be slightly unfair to say she's looking down her nose at the characters she describes. Its also worth pointing out that several of these pieces involve the use of a persona, so perhaps this is where the (in my view) misinterpretation lies.

[Eldan Goldenberg]

Interested in getting this collection after reading one of her poems at http://thestaresnest.com/2015/03/01/m...

[Gretel · Rating 2 out of 5]

72 pages of taking the piss out of poor people. Things are a lot more entertaining when Jones punches up.