Hitting Game - Clifford Graham

'The Hitting Game' is the first collection of poems by the London-based young poet Graham Clifford. The vibrancy of the poet's voice and the immediacy of his claims upon our attention are clear. These poems provoke as well as delight. Characters arrive as 'you' in 'Obvious Constellations' 'Amazing' and 'Trying'. Incidents are approached from disarmingly intimate and also entertainingly oblique angles. These are urban poems where nature appears like a strange intrusion: a flock of swallows 'flick about dust like black flames'. There is also a gentleness and empathy, particularly in regards to children, as in 'About my daughter' where the word echoes: 'the er-ing sound of doubt/mixed with ought.' There is humour and pathos as in the poem about a chimp and her keeper. These are poems full of minor dramas and fresh enchantments.