Mike's poetry collections are as follows. (For more information click on the title)
Identified Flying Objects (2024)
Poems in the Case (2018)
The Man Who Wasn't Ever Here (2017)
Pictures From a Postponed Exhbition (2014)
Fred & Blossom (2013)
Tradesman's Exit (2009)
Tell It Like It Might Be (2008)
Uneasy Relations (2007)
Inklings of Complicity (2003)
Anglicized by Common Use (1998)
***
Poems in the Case is a genre-bending volume which places an eclectic poetry selection within the framework of a murder mystery and features ten poets caught up in a classic detective story.
When participants gather at a poetry workshop in rural Kent they are looking forward to a preview of a collection of posthumously discovered unpublished poems by the admired and much-missed poet Eric Jessop. Within a few days however tensions have arisen between members of the group—not least over doubts about the collection’s authenticity. When a very public confrontation is followed by two sudden and mysterious deaths will poetic sensibility prove to be of any use in determining what really happened?
For an on line review see The High Window 2019
A poem from Poems in the Case
ARRANGEMENT FOR STRINGS Jazz and puppetry, she says are twins. She’s right: harmonic lines allow as little freedom as a finger up the spine or wires through wrists that push or pull you into false positions. I’m a home-made marionette. She holds the strings. Come here, she calls, pretending that she doesn’t; next she’ll brush me with a kiss or with a lash. I won’t ask which until I close the door. Should she cut me loose I’d slump, a bundle of discordant limbs. Puppetry and jazz run risks: alfresco melodies divorced from chords collapse, go sprawling as disjointed notes. She’s making me negotiate departures: clean out china/filing cabinets and clear the desktop/bedside diary; leave notelets for my next/my old employer/landlord/lover. Puppetry works hand in glove with jazz. My first-choice orchestra has been marched away in chains and handcuffs; in its place a second string quintet rehearses ersatz hot club music..
***
The Man Who Wasn't Ever Here from Wayleave Press extends and elaborates the story of Mike's Irish grandfather which began as a poem sequence in his first book Anglicised by Common Use (1998). As the book's preface tells us:
Our forebears leave few traces of themselves, unless they stumble briefly into the roving spotlight of recorded history. Thomas Ovans was born in Ireland in the 1850s but came as a shipyard worker to Middlesbrough, where he changed his name to Evans and got married (one small step towards becoming my grandfather). He later went to sea with P&O as a ship’s engineer; and family folklore, supported by a little photographic evidence, says he formed a shipboard friendship with the opera singer Nellie Melba. It is fact not folklore that he came from the same part of County Leitrim as Seán MacDermott, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. Thomas himself became a posthumous news item in 1917 when his ship hit a mine in the Indian Ocean.
A poem from The Man Who Wasn't Ever Here ....
Press Reports Daily Express Bombay Correspondent, 2 July 1917 A widow takes the roughly scissored column- inches and unfolds their yellowed story. The passengers were pleasantly engaged, with lifebelts off and some were playing quoits. At just past noon they felt the first explosion. The ship went down in only sixteen minutes, in shallow water, with her masts still showing: but wireless traffic had already ceased some time before the incident because the atmosphere that day was much disturbed. One gentleman, who had secured a place on lifeboat ten, descended to his cabin, in order to collect a sum of money. Discovering the boat had left without him he went down again to fetch his watch. As passengers were saved from utmost danger a well-known theologian jammed his fingers climbing in a lifeboat. Most of those who died were in the engine room – six Britons and fourteen native crewmen. Thirty mailbags have been recovered and the search continues. Also missing is one Parsee gentleman of unknown name. A passenger's pet dog was saved and reached Bombay before its master. It was at the quay to greet him.
***
They tell stories that are partly evolution-myths and partly parables about colonization.
Reviews can be found on Emma Lee's blog and in London Grip and Lunar Poetry
A poem from Pictures from a Postponed Exhibition ....
NOTES FOR A CATALOGUE (1)
In an arid landscape, slender figures
curved as question marks
enact bewilderment at being
found beneath acrylic sky.
Space is what the sun can burn
and time’s the tallying of drawn-out days
on brittle limbs of stunted trees.
Painted figures cannot speak
but they can mime and want
stiff gestures recognized.
So extract a narrative
from each now in front of you
and a dozen thens remembered
or imagined down the gallery.
Ignore the hundred nevers
missing from the catalogue.
From the blind side of survival
sudden gusts come perfumed with suspicions
groves of foliage were left behind
before there was a word for garden.
***
Fred & Blossom (Shoestring Press, 2013) is a narrative sequence based on the true story of F.G. Miles and Maxine "Blossom" Forbes-Robertson. Their romance began in an aeroplane and throughout the 1930s they were at the centre of the fashionable world of light aviation. The poems touch on the beginnings of airline travel, the British class system, the Spanish Civil War and early attempts at supersonic flight. They also give glimpses of such figures as Douglas Bader, Joseph Stalin and Peter Pan and let us hear the distant voices of Rudyard Kipling, Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman.
The Fred & Blossom cover image is a detail from a painting by Howard Fritz.
I love this book and I love what an obvious labor of love it was... the amazing story, the different forms of poetry, the prose-poems based only on words from articles written at the time. Fred & Blossom, besides having a consistent narrative voice, can also do the characters in different voices. - Murray Bodo
This is stunning ... [I] enjoyed it enormously and feel much better informed about ... history, Englishness, innovation, romance, adventure and much more. [The] choice of poems/forms/found material is wonderful - Jane Kirwan
A great story and tremendously well done. It’s ambitious and beautifully turned, and much of it is masterful. The treated texts are a delight. There was clearly relish in the telling: I do get the sense of a poet enjoying his craft. - James Norcliffe
... gloriously eccentric ... an improbable triumph - Jeremy Page in The Frogmore Papers
... precision of language is what makes Bartholomew-Biggs's volume tick - Deborah Tyler-Bennett in Under the Radar
For an on-line review by Paul McLoughlin see London Grip and another by Afric McGlinchey at Sabotage Reviews
A poem from Fred & Blossom ...
How to make yourselves an aeroplane
Fred can be the fuselage. He’s broad and blunt.
Old cars and lorries earn his living:
in return they get his tenderest attentions.
His touch and hearing can detect
distress in engines, sensing when a thin high note
is pleading for the revs to drop
or warning of a worn-out bearing. He has grown
green fi ngers with machinery.
For wings, use Blossom’s outstretched arms.
Her proper name’s Maxine but she is always Blossom
to her friends – that’s everyone
who’s anyone in London Theatre. From them
she’s learnt to ride on optimism –
or its simulation by that certain magic
mix of attitude and movement
always on the brink of generating lift.
***
Tradesman's Exit (Shoestring Press, 2009) tests the links between who we are, what we do and why we are remembered, mixing personal recollections with tributes to an array of master craftsmen in fields as diverse as sport, music, art, film and literature.
The book's striking cover image is by Shelagh Hickman .
"Bartholomew-Biggs has a particular gift for witty allusion ... his wit, however, is coupled with judgement." - Glyn Pursglove
" ... sometimes jolting our memories or suggesting something just beyond our knowing" - Barry Cole
An on-line review of Tradesman's Exit appears on Eyewear
A poem from Tradesman's Exit ....
Bleak
For R.S.Thomas
For years the coal-black priest
tried by the dim light in his head
to reach the surface of existence
where God’s big hand for ever
splits infinity
like slate, His small hand
pointing always to midnight or to noon.
For years he worked as well
at the bone hard face of Huw Puw
who would not tell the time and who cared nothing
for all the spiral wisdom
of the galaxies,
whose hands were only raised
in anger, or to cut another swede.
Can anything be won
from such unyielding ground?
No answer. He choked on dust
and coughed up blood-streaked poetry.
***
Mike's first full collection was Tell it Like it Might Be (Smokestack Books, 2008) which both celebrates and questions the value of human imagination as the source of both grand designs and private fears.
The cover image is a detail from a painting by Howard Fritz.
"This is vigorous and wide-ranging poetry....Here is a book to be welcomed and savoured, by a poet who not only looks but sees" - Peter Bennet
"If my house caught fire and I had to run out very quickly I would reach for Tell it Like it Might Be - it's serious work from a very able poet." - Other Poetry
A poem from Tell it Like it Might Be ....
Eleventh Floor
Candy is my weakness.
The grey-pink wall around your high-rise balcony
yielded as my fancy pressed against it
like nougat to a tongue
and, stretching into sticky strands, it bulged
to tilt me slowly outwards
just before your grip upon the camera failed
at the instant when the shutter tripped
and it went plummeting
to photograph its own destruction
in a zoom lens shot
that ultimately missed the lady on the street
turning pirouettes as laboured as
a drowsy ballerina
or a skater in a space suit
who thought she was concealed
by sidewalk shrubs that altitude had simplified
to jumbles of brown smudges, just as if
the city’s landscape artist
had rummaged in a box of chocolates.Mike's poetry has also appeared in several anthologies - among the most recent are
Orni-thology (Poetry Wivenhoe 2016),
Poems for Jeremy Corbyn (Shoestring 2016),
50 Ways to Fly (Rhythm & Muse, 2017 ),
Poems for Stanley Spencer (Two Rivers, 2017)
***
Mike's full collections were preceded by three chapbooks.
Uneasy Relations (Hearing Eye Press, 2007) contains poems which play with themes drawn from the author's career as a professional mathematician but also touch on myth & fable, the arts of prediction and preventive maintenance, hill-walking, financial portfolio theory and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
"... elegant and relevant - even to non-mathematicians" - Sphinx
"He poses ... questions that are unanswerable, scary and fascinating" - Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society.
Some of the poems in Uneasy Relations first appeared as space-fillers in two mathematical text books published by Springer -
Nonlinear Optimization with Financial Applications and Nonlinear Optimization with Engineering Applications.
Links between mathematics and poetry in these books are explored in a London Grip article.
A poem from Uneasy relations ...
Optimization
means a quest for best answers
with the least trouble.
Optimism means
believing both objectives
are achievable.
***
The poems in Inkings of Complicity (Pikestaff Press, 2003) dip into the undercurrents beneath everyday experience which may - or may not - explain what happens at the visible surface.
"Impressively peopled with detail" - Envoi
A poem from Inklings of Complicity ...
Criminal tendencies
I was talking in my sleep to this policeman.
What it is, he said, is this. You trust your judgement.
You get real close in up against your suspect
then you lean on him
(and here he rubbed his face on mine)
and you notice his reaction.
You can always tell the guilty ones.
Does it stand up well in court? He didn't answer
but applied his cheek again and I could feel
reactions that were asking to be noticed.
So I made an effort.
What I want to know, I said,
is how many of the people
get to pass your test and walk away?
None of them, he smiled, and that's the point.
That's the way we know we've got it right.***
Anglicized by Common Use (Waldean Press, 1998) explains the author's tenuous but genuine claim to Irish nationality through a speculative poetic history of the life and times of his grandfather from County Leitrim.
"A superb first collection" - Iota
A poem from Anglicized by Common Use ...
Birthright
Grandad drifted
to Liverpool from Leitrim – changed his name –
mis-spelled a parent
on his marriage lines – and last was posted
Lost at Sea,
two years younger than he should have been.
Such evidence
as this is all there is and barely fills
the donor’s card,
that's propped, dog-eared, beside the quart of blood
which he bequeathed me.
Yet, like Isaac’s kiss, it does the trick.
I’ve got the passport
but I’m waiting for a destination;
and plaited flex
is hanging frayed beyond an old exchange
whose faulty relays
send silences to haunt my answerphone
by cutting off
his calls suggesting that we celebrate.
If this corkscrew
he’s slipped into my fist is ever used
perhaps the past
will crumble as I draw it back towards me.
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