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Going Off Grid
This contemporary collection by one of Wales’ most prolific poets focuses on digital capitalism, the negative influence of big tech and our addiction to data. Lewis is deeply concerned with the negative direction mankind is taking and cares passionately about helping to steer us all back to a far simpler, happier place in the far more important offline world. Death and depression, as well as love and nature, are also ever-present themes and the whole package is tightly woven together with some subtle, yet haunting, photographs. “An epic tour de force of modern poetry. The opening poem, (Diet), is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' and this author's ‘Roadkill‘, but this time focuses on digital capitalism. Lewis is primarily concerned with the madness and addiction pervading our online worlds while we neglect the more important offline. The title is a hope rather than a statement.
“The book includes a handful of vignettes and reflections of the author's immediate locale edited in the style of Julia Margaret Cameron that provide an added texture and insight to the text. Another piece of top drawer writing by one of Wales's best poets.” - Andrew Davies
“The book includes a handful of vignettes and reflections of the author's immediate locale edited in the style of Julia Margaret Cameron that provide an added texture and insight to the text. Another piece of top drawer writing by one of Wales's best poets.” - Andrew Davies
128 pages, Paperback
Published April 4, 2018
53 people want to read
About the author
Dave Lewis
25 books10 followersDave Lewis is a Welsh writer based in Pontypridd, south Wales.
Dave has been widely published all over the world in a number of literary magazines and web sites. He has published a number of books and his work has included poetry, prose, short stories, photography, haiku, travel, comedy and crime novels.
www.david-lewis.co.uk
Dave has been widely published all over the world in a number of literary magazines and web sites. He has published a number of books and his work has included poetry, prose, short stories, photography, haiku, travel, comedy and crime novels.
www.david-lewis.co.uk
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 28, 2019
One of the best poetry collections I've ever read and certainly one of the best poets in Wales today. The scope and depth of this book is quite staggering. Why this guy is not more well-known is a crime.
January 14, 2019
One of the best poetry books I've ever read, truly inspiring.
December 15, 2018
REVIEW OF ‘GOING OFF GRID’ BY SALLY SPEDDING
From this outstanding collection’s topical title to the poet’s Notes at the end, this life-changing ‘Going Off Grid’ should be compulsory reading for all Millennials, adolescents and youngsters, currently plagued by low self-esteem and sometimes even driven to suicide, as well as those of riper years bewildered by the world today, who wonder is this all there is? On a personal note, I keep this collection close to remind me what is important and precious during our brief span on this ravaged planet.
Born and brought up in Cilfynydd in the Welsh valleys, Dave Lewis’ early observations and responses to the natural world around him, including its man-made scars still lingering, formed the bedrock for his two earlier collections, culminating in this searingly honest, often intensely personal and thought-provoking publication, enhanced by his own haunting, monochrome photographs.
One of Wales’ most important poets, Dave Lewis who founded and still organises the highly-regarded International Welsh Poetry Competition, is also a crime novelist, teacher, publisher, photographer and keen cyclist, sharpening an already keen eye on his surroundings. Having studied Zoology at Cardiff University, he spent a formative year in Kenya, highlighting awareness of how man’s greed and depredations of their planet are leading us all down a dangerous one-way street.
But ‘Going Off Grid’ isn’t - like less ambitious poets - a mere rant but recalls a time before people cared whether someone ‘liked’ one of their Facebook posts. When doors stayed open for neighbours to come in and out.
Lewis’ first photograph of the flank of a hill in Cilfynydd, shows not only two wind-ravaged silver birches, but a huge pylon. This kickstarts the tone and theme of ‘(Diet)’.
We are all zek
gorging on diets of data and cortisol,
from the high priests of posts
to the tellers of tweets and the AdWords of angst.
Fourteen pages of dissection and confession follow, ending with…
And in the overwhelming darkness,
there is no pardon for their arson,
we’re just garnish for their market,
we are harvest,
we are carcass.
Lewis’ eponymous poem. ‘Off Grid’ is headed by Bob Dylan’s ‘No-one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.’
Can it be true
That you’re not on the grid,
Not indexed by Google, unstalkable?
The poet then observes towards the end...
And then it came to me –
sudden like a moonbeam
that would kiss all your flowers…
if you’re happy
and living
and lost to this nonsense -
this cycle of retweets,
this holier than thou they call normal.
Lewis’ poems are vivid and alive with descriptions, never skin-deep, carrying meaning. The Manx Shearwater described in ‘Puffinus, puffinus’ is…
Lacking red, yellow and orange
but you shear the air to make up for it…
…Ginsberg’s puffin who cries at the moonlight
Come home to me at night…
…And you connect for life
And say hello with a kiss
As old as me
And much wiser I see.
I also connect with what Lewis has to say in ‘West Riding (After reading a Walt Whitman poem I like.)’ This is freighted with memory of…
…the long, hard drive to
the city of the dead. A mercy trip to Elfed. Not to see the forests
of fifteen hundred years ago, not the wool merchants or the iron
masters. Not the banker immigrants, or any of the dyed people
on the fast-flowing river-boats.
I travelled there for you and no-one else.
But then came the rendezvous …
Now on an accidental day, far away in time and space, years
past, far from that diamond bed…
Lewis earlier recalls how, having ‘picked the wrong one’ and ends with…
…I shout at false memories like I
betrayed a holy calling of some sort.
In ‘Black,’ a sparse, very moving poem, Lewis particularises the passing of his father. Grief, the black we have all known in some circumstance or other, is…
In the darkness
Where the knives and words
are gone, where the smothered babies breathe again
and the puppies all run free,
in the black,
the beautiful black,
the happy black
where love is total
and forever.
Simply awesome.
The photograph of Lewis’ last lines of Jack ‘Blaina’ &’’Gran’ adds to this poem’s pathos,
…as the sound of sawing bone faded in the rain
And the bells of a French church signalled he was finally going home.
That last line still makes my heart flip… Unforgettable.
***
Published in 2018 by www.publishandprint.co.uk
www.davidlewis.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1986497565
by Sally Spedding
From this outstanding collection’s topical title to the poet’s Notes at the end, this life-changing ‘Going Off Grid’ should be compulsory reading for all Millennials, adolescents and youngsters, currently plagued by low self-esteem and sometimes even driven to suicide, as well as those of riper years bewildered by the world today, who wonder is this all there is? On a personal note, I keep this collection close to remind me what is important and precious during our brief span on this ravaged planet.
Born and brought up in Cilfynydd in the Welsh valleys, Dave Lewis’ early observations and responses to the natural world around him, including its man-made scars still lingering, formed the bedrock for his two earlier collections, culminating in this searingly honest, often intensely personal and thought-provoking publication, enhanced by his own haunting, monochrome photographs.
One of Wales’ most important poets, Dave Lewis who founded and still organises the highly-regarded International Welsh Poetry Competition, is also a crime novelist, teacher, publisher, photographer and keen cyclist, sharpening an already keen eye on his surroundings. Having studied Zoology at Cardiff University, he spent a formative year in Kenya, highlighting awareness of how man’s greed and depredations of their planet are leading us all down a dangerous one-way street.
But ‘Going Off Grid’ isn’t - like less ambitious poets - a mere rant but recalls a time before people cared whether someone ‘liked’ one of their Facebook posts. When doors stayed open for neighbours to come in and out.
Lewis’ first photograph of the flank of a hill in Cilfynydd, shows not only two wind-ravaged silver birches, but a huge pylon. This kickstarts the tone and theme of ‘(Diet)’.
We are all zek
gorging on diets of data and cortisol,
from the high priests of posts
to the tellers of tweets and the AdWords of angst.
Fourteen pages of dissection and confession follow, ending with…
And in the overwhelming darkness,
there is no pardon for their arson,
we’re just garnish for their market,
we are harvest,
we are carcass.
Lewis’ eponymous poem. ‘Off Grid’ is headed by Bob Dylan’s ‘No-one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.’
Can it be true
That you’re not on the grid,
Not indexed by Google, unstalkable?
The poet then observes towards the end...
And then it came to me –
sudden like a moonbeam
that would kiss all your flowers…
if you’re happy
and living
and lost to this nonsense -
this cycle of retweets,
this holier than thou they call normal.
Lewis’ poems are vivid and alive with descriptions, never skin-deep, carrying meaning. The Manx Shearwater described in ‘Puffinus, puffinus’ is…
Lacking red, yellow and orange
but you shear the air to make up for it…
…Ginsberg’s puffin who cries at the moonlight
Come home to me at night…
…And you connect for life
And say hello with a kiss
As old as me
And much wiser I see.
I also connect with what Lewis has to say in ‘West Riding (After reading a Walt Whitman poem I like.)’ This is freighted with memory of…
…the long, hard drive to
the city of the dead. A mercy trip to Elfed. Not to see the forests
of fifteen hundred years ago, not the wool merchants or the iron
masters. Not the banker immigrants, or any of the dyed people
on the fast-flowing river-boats.
I travelled there for you and no-one else.
But then came the rendezvous …
Now on an accidental day, far away in time and space, years
past, far from that diamond bed…
Lewis earlier recalls how, having ‘picked the wrong one’ and ends with…
…I shout at false memories like I
betrayed a holy calling of some sort.
In ‘Black,’ a sparse, very moving poem, Lewis particularises the passing of his father. Grief, the black we have all known in some circumstance or other, is…
In the darkness
Where the knives and words
are gone, where the smothered babies breathe again
and the puppies all run free,
in the black,
the beautiful black,
the happy black
where love is total
and forever.
Simply awesome.
The photograph of Lewis’ last lines of Jack ‘Blaina’ &’’Gran’ adds to this poem’s pathos,
…as the sound of sawing bone faded in the rain
And the bells of a French church signalled he was finally going home.
That last line still makes my heart flip… Unforgettable.
***
Published in 2018 by www.publishandprint.co.uk
www.davidlewis.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1986497565
by Sally Spedding
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews