Harry Whitewolf's Blog - Posts Tagged "labour"

Only a few weeks ago, I had no intention of publishing a new poetry book this year. I mean, how could I? For one thing, I didn’t have any poems.

After I wrote the poems of Underdogs Unite nearly three years ago, my muse left me. And I’m one of those people who can’t write if I sit down and try. I just have to wait for inspiration to come. It’s either here or it isn’t, and for a long time now, my creative writing has mostly been on pause.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t still write the odd poem every now and then. So, I looked back at the few I’d written over the last year or so and discovered they were actually much better than I had remembered. I’d also written a few poems over the UK election period in December, and they seemed to go hand in hand with my others. Before I knew it, I was putting the poems together, finding a common thread and purpose, and writing a plethora of spanking brand-new poems in a very short amount of time. I’ve not had that kind of short-burst flash of inspiration since writing my first poetry release New Beat Newbie back in 2015. And it’s actually been great to feel that creative buzz again.

I also discovered I was writing on a topic I thought I’d never write about in detail: bloody Brexit. Like everyone else, I’d become completely bored of the constant fiasco, and after the Tories overwhelmingly won the recent election, I felt more disillusioned about politics and the hope for change perhaps more than ever before. It seems as though my anger at that situation, and the last few years of British politics, had been boiling away in the back of my mind, and it needed to be unleashed. And so, my new poetry book Broken Albion was born. Not that it solely focuses on Brexit, but it’s certainly the central theme.

It seems fitting to release the book on the 31st January 2020 - the withdrawal date of the UK leaving the EU. So, watch this space.