Loud Music Makes You Drive Faster

by Mark Blayney

Loud Music Makes you Drive Faster is Mark’s first collection of poetry, an anthology of his spoken word performances. Surreal, playful and sometimes tender, these poems sit in the tradition of spoken word pioneered by Roger McGough, John Cooper Clarke and Hollie McNish. Robot train inspectors, static caravans and museum statues all get a voice, as well as Lionel Richie songs that didn’t chart, a poem written backwards and the historical revelation that at Waterloo, Napoleon did not surrender. Along the way, there are musings on ageing, travelling, fatherhood, falling in love and falling out of love.

70 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2016

About the author

Somerset Maugham Award for Two Kinds of Silence and winner of the 2023 New Welsh Writing Awards for Invisibility.

He is currently a Royal Literary Fellow at Cardiff University and works with writers at every level of their career as a mentor and tutor.

There is currently a launch offer at http://bit.ly/markblayney for 1-2-1 online tutorials.

Mark was an inaugural Hay Festival Writer at Work, won a Wales Media Award for his journalism and has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition.

Other books of fiction include Conversations with Magic Stones, Doppelgangers and poetry Loud music makes you drive faster with Parthian.

Latest poetry The view from my shed with Dreich Chapbooks.

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acutely funny and more literary than you’d expect. Blaney is occasionally serious and shows how tender and thoughtful he can be. Inventive, deadpan and slightly wry.