Books by Ian Gouge
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The Labours of Charles E.
Charles E. is not well. A ‘man of letters’ and regarded by some as a ‘National Treasure’, there are elements in his past which surely disqualify such an accolade — even if his somewhat unconventional beginning adds a little spice to his legend.
Whether or not he has reached the bottom of his creative well, Charles has decided to set the record straight, to relate the narrative of his writerly life through his own lens.
Yet having been immersed in telling stories for over fifty years, just how close can Charles get to the truth — and if he professes to do so, how prepared are you to believe him?
9781068670190
So, you think you're a Writer
So, you think you’re a writer?
Well, quite possibly you are. Indeed you may be a very good one. Or you believe you are reasonably talented, but deep down you’re not too sure that you are as ‘good’ as you’d like to be.
Perhaps you don’t know if what you’re trying to write is the thing you should be writing; perhaps you’re feeling disheartened by years of competition and Agent rejections. Or maybe you’re simply struggling to finish ‘your novel’. Or even put pen to paper at all.
And what does ‘A Writer’ look like, anyway?
So, you think you’re a Writer? aims to help you understand yourself as ‘a writer’ and offer ways in which you can gain clarity on your work and help you live your best ‘writing life’.
9781738469345
Bound
The poetic monologues in Bound are the unspoken thoughts of individuals who find themselves in situations in which they are somehow tied or trapped. In their own way, each ‘speaker’ attempts to come to terms with their situation, to reconcile themselves with it, and — in some cases — perhaps find a way out.
Echoing some of the work of Samuel Beckett and T.S.Eliot, the poems are designed both to be read off the page and delivered on stage as dramatic monologues.
The penultimate piece in the collection, Crash: the last 30 minutes of a life, was performed at the Ripon Theatre Festival in June, 2023
9781068670107
Dust, dancing
In Ian Gouge’s eclectic new collection, Dust, dancing, many of the protagonists find themselves thwarted: by ambition, by love, by old age. They experience unavoidable setbacks and occasional victories: the man tattooing his life history on his back; the woman fantasising about a Hollywood film star; the man fired from his job; the actress believing she is destined to be ‘a Bond Girl’; the policewoman making a gruesome discovery. We share the pleasure and pain associated with their various journeys, the resonance of our own experience adding layers to our reading.
9781738469352
The Red Tie
Vincent edits books. It is a modest and quiet occupation – yet one which is about to be thrown into turmoil thanks to the arrival of woman, her gift to him, and the words of his old mentor: “it’s not what we keep out of a book that counts, but what we might put in.“
Orwell meets Kafka in this tale of a dystopian future which could be a lot closer than we might realise…
9781068670169
Less
In this, Ian Gouge’s eleventh collection of poetry, “less” is characterised by absence: of love, of money, of understanding, and of life. We are exposed — on occasion brutally — to an experience of the world which is seldom what we would wish it to be.
9781738469376
Grimsby Docks
In the mid-19th century, Grimsby docks was perhaps the most modern such facility in Britain, its fishing boom occurring during the latter part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Indeed, right up until the 1960s the docks was a lively, thriving place.
Sixty years later, and fewer than one hundred of the area’s Victorian buildings remain; three quarters of these are unoccupied – or impossible to now occupy. Although some regeneration of the part of the docks known as ‘The Kasbah’ is being pursued, this area of Grimsby is now one of the most deprived wards in the country.
Grimsby Docks is a modern-day examination of this once thriving industrial landscape through photography and poetry.
9781738469383
17 Alma Road
A house filled with history and secrets is more than mere bricks and mortar; not only a mirror on the past, it can also be a window to the future.
“masterful..soul-searching. I would have liked to live next door to Owen and Maddie; I feel we would have been friends” – Siobhan Gifford
“a dextrously woven story of how the complexities of any given life remain with us, and remain too within the bricks and mortar that bore witness” – Jonty Pennington-Twist
”a beautifully crafted story” – Janet Burl
9781739356989
Once Significant Others
A group of five friends who, some thirty years after they lived and worked in the same town, come back together to honour an old friend who has recently died. The weekend is intended as a celebration but merely serves to reignite old emotions and uncover long-held secrets.
“Sally Rooney meets Henry James” – Jim Friedman
“this honest exploration of human nature helped me understand myself better” – Ann Pelletier-Topping
“a story that questions the whole idea of friendship and the notion that we can ever really know anyone” – Janet Philo
“a deeply engaging book…every moment of dialogue and recollection is thoroughly believable” – David Punter
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Tilt
Take four strangers arriving in London on the same train one weekday morning, then follow them as their various endeavours sees them criss-cross the capital before they take the same service north later in the day.
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An Irregular Piece of Sky
An Irregular Piece of Sky contains fifteen contemporary stories in which we meet characters who are trying to come to terms with loss and grief, the potential of love, their histories, and the opportunities the future may offer them.
Ian Gouge introduces us to people who – just like us – are striving to make sense of their place in the world.
9781916289987
On Parliament Hill
Her voice is a trigger; a voice which forces Neil to relive the crises and failures of his past, and which offers him the possibility of a positive new future. But before he can decide on what he wants the life ahead of him to look like – and her role in it – he must pass judgement on himself.
Ian Gouge’s novels focus on individuals who are trying to come to terms with their histories; characters facing a struggle, and legacies from which they have to find a way to free themselves.
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A Pattern of Sorts
We often encounter difficulty when trying to reconcile our memories of events with what actually happened. In the almost inevitable mis-match, our mind plays tricks on us, and what we have recently learned and how we have recently lived gets in the way and colours the past.
Pressed to recall his own life, the challenge of juggling myth and reality is dangerously fraught for Luke – especially given the story of his remarkable emotional high, and the catastrophe which followed it.
“If there was one thing I knew about Luke it was that he liked certainty and closure; he hated loose ends and from what I could see they upset him. But looking back now, is that really true? I mean, did I really think that at the time or is it just me seeing into the heart of it, now that it’s all too late?”
“Is that just me saying it now, remembering it the way in which I have chosen to remember it, providing a gloss, an overlay, in order to give the impression that throughout it all I was calm and in control?”
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The Opposite of Remembering
Liam is haunted by his age and the history it forces upon him. Yet he is also plagued by the need to make more – to generate new memories to recall later, before it gets too late, especially when his wife of over thirty years turns his world upside down, as does the woman he meets in an anonymous hotel dining room.
Against a background of domestic parental turmoil, his daughter fights her own demons to try and make sense of her place in a disintegrating family and the wider world.
Much of our lives is enslaved by the act of remembering – but sometimes it is about the opposite of that…
9781999784089
At Maunston Quay
Life weaves its magic of triumphs and disappointments everywhere, and often those burdened with more than their fair share of tragedy can feel lost and alone.
Even in a quiet coastal backwater such as Maunston Quay, people like Lewis Airy struggle with their personal tragedies and grief. And when Anna arrives, evidently trying to come to terms with the cruel twist life has dealt her, she seems at first yet another individual to have found herself washed-up in the village.
But Anna proves to be more than that, and not only for herself.
Against all the odds, perhaps Maunston Quay is the kind of place to offer the second chances that give hope to everyone.
“My new year started with reading Ian’s novel, At Maunston Quay, and it was perfect. I had forgotten that for the last two years I have bounced between quarantined home life and fitful re-entries into social settings. Ian’s book grounded me with slow, gentle reminders that our connections with ourselves, our environment, and each other can heal in miraculous ways. Ian, thank you for this gift! You made me cry on the subway!” – from a US reader
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An Infinity of Mirrors
Given his profession as a Historian, it was inevitable that Mark would find himself one day writing the story of his late father, the acclaimed author Charles Packard. As his biographer, Mark is blessed with a wealth of material: first-hand experience, his father’s own work, testimonies of his Aunt, and Charles’ friends, colleagues and enemies.
Yet what he uncovers is unexpected, elements of his father’s life resonating with his own. These parallels begin to intrude in a very tangible way on Mark’s interpretation of own his life, his own history becoming more closely aligned to that of his father.
Instead of being the closing of a chapter, a sealing up of the past, the biography proves to be something far darker, unleashing personal daemons that Mark could never have anticipated.
9781999784065
Degrees of Separation
We are all connected. There are links – like links in a chain – that join each of us, everyone to everyone else.
“Degrees of Separation” is a series of short stories, each tied to the next it through one of its two characters. The book’s invisible thread weaves its way across geography and time until the circle is made complete when a character from the first story appears again in the final one.
But each story is also a narrative about separation in its own right; a wife from a husband, a son from a father, a friend from a friend. “Degrees of Separation” explores what it means to be apart, and considers the things that can divide us – or potentially keep us together.
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The Big Frog Theory
What do you most need when facing a complete disintegration of the life you have been leading? Where does the loss of your job, the betrayal of your wife, lead you?
Well, in Neville’s case to a small tea shop at the foot of the Malvern hills. But if he has gone there for some peace, some solitude, the chance to assess his situation and get his life back in order, then he is in for a shock. Is it madness that makes his coffee cup keep magically refilling, or the china geese on the wall try and fly away? And how could it be possible that a stale slice of Black Forest Gateaux would suddenly be able to offer him Agony Aunt advice?
Guided by Samuel, an aged coach driver (in his equally aged coach!), follow Neville as his travels take him to Paris, to the Derby at Epsom, dancing on a cruise ship, and into outrageous and dangerous adventures – and towards an unlikely romance that might just save his life…
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Losing Moby Dick and Other Stories
LOSING MOBY DICK
Books are, for many people, precious things. They become host not only to the words within them, but to individual history and memory, thoughts and feelings. So when Jack finds he has lost his old copy of “Moby Dick” he is suddenly knocked off-balance. He knows that it should not really matter that much – but it had ‘associations’…
So Jack determines to replace it – and not with a pristine copy, but if he can, with an old second-hand volume from the very bookshop at which he acquired his original.
plus:
WRITING TO GISELLA
RIDING THE ESCALATORS
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Secrets & Wisdom
‘Secrets & Wisdom’ started life in 2016 as a project with a specific design. The idea was to write a series of short stories, each based on one of the traditional Olympian Gods and on one or more of their individual characteristics. In addition, each story would contain within it either a ‘secret’ held close by the protagonist, or the demonstration – or otherwise! – of ‘wisdom’ / self-knowledge in some form or other.
Over time, as the original project progressed, the reworking of some additional material – both modern and ancient – appeared to lend itself to the general theme, and so the notion was born to expand the brief of ‘Secrets & Wisdom’ and to create a slightly wider and more eclectic collection of short stories.
From the original project, “Angela”, “Anne”, “Hester”, “Hobart” and “Westminster” have made it into this volume (the remaining seven Gods currently lie dormant until they are awoken at some point in the future!).
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Crash
What happens during the last thirty minutes of your life as you struggle to wake from sleep one final time?
Does the entirety of your life indeed ‘flash before your eyes’, or are there just a few random incidents and moments which insist on being replayed and resolved?
And when these too eventually begin to dissolve, what then…?
Attempting to explore a fresh and flexible poetic style, Crash was partly inspired by the work of T.S.Eliot and Samuel Beckett.
Crash was first performed by the author in its final form as a dramatic monologue at the Ripon Theatre Festival, 2023.
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not the Sonnets
Imagine tackling the entirety of Shakespeare’s sonnet cannon with the aim of creating a contemporary and modern interpretation of the poems both in terms of subject and form.
Imagine starting where most poets end – with the rhyme – and beginning each new poem by stripping out every single word from each of the Sonnets except the last one on each line.
Imagine that in tackling the pieces completely the other way around, the primary question became ‘what subject will fit a poem whose lines end with these exact words?’
Imagine a collection entitled not the Sonnets, one which has borrowed its scaffolding from the Bard to produce a sonnet sequence which is something else entirely…
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Selected Poems: 1976-2022
At a recent reading event, Ian Gouge was asked which of his collections was his ‘best book’. It was an innocent enough question, designed to aid a purchasing decision. It was also an unfair one. Any marginal preference he may have for one or the other is inevitably dwarfed by the knowledge that there are good pieces in all his volumes of poetry and that, in expressing a preference, a potential reader will always be in danger of missing out on something he would like to think ‘worthy’.
For a while he had been toying with the idea of pulling together a ‘selected works’, gathering all his favourite poems under a single cover. On the back of that ambition, the ‘best book’ question only added fuel to the fire.
So here it is, a ‘Greatest Hits’ from his seven collections published to-date – plus a small number of as yet unseen poems. This endeavour in no way diminishes the value of the individual books themselves; there are many more poems that might easily have found their way into this volume had size not been a consideration.
9781838232115
Homelessness of a Child
By the time Ian Gouge went to university he had already lived in seventeen different places – houses, pre-fabs, flats, rooms of one sort or another – and all within the environs of the same two towns: Portsmouth and Gosport, on the south coast of England. No single location more than four miles from the next, between some you could have measured the distance in hundreds of yards. If you put a pin in a map for each, the resulting image would look like the aftermath of a rather well-played game of ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey’.
A number of these accommodations had been emergency refuges provided by the Local Authority to stave off homelessness; two the 60s/70s equivalents of ‘sofa surfing’. But in reality, every single residence proved temporary. Exactly at a time when a child needed security, the very notions of ‘home’, ‘family’ – even ‘love’ – were being challenged, their meanings redefined, shaken to their core; experiences which scarred both an upbringing and the future which followed it.
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The Myths of Native Trees
Myths attach themselves to just about everything. This is certainly true in the case of English native trees. Pagan, mystical or religious, some of these are well-known, but others are more obscure.
In “The Myths of Native Trees”, Ian Gouge uses fragments from some of these myths as the basis for a suite of poems which are in turn mystical, lyrical.
We build our own myths too. Myths about our past – or our imagined past – and about our relationship with the world around us, real or otherwise. “The Myths of Native Trees” also teases at some of these, in some cases celebrating them, in others revelling in their inescapable opacity.
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First-time Visions of Earth from Space
When people escaped gravity and started to travel in space, astronauts were amazed by the view when they looked back at the Earth. There are many photographs of such individual moments of wonder – and captured alongside these images come anecdotes recording the difficulty the astronauts encountered in trying to describe what they were seeing. This fascinates me. Not just the inevitable challenge with language and expression, but also the compulsion to depict and interpret in the first place.
In a way, Poets face the same struggle. We strive to communicate that which is – and can only be – an intensely personal experience, and in so doing, make it accessible, universal. In attempting to understand something within ourselves, we hope our efforts may bring some element of enlightenment – and delight – to others.
9781999784058
After the Rehearsals
Having received praise for his recent work ‘Human Archaeology’ – “a compelling exploration of the meaning of memory and history”, “an interesting, special form of poetic plate-spinning” – Ian Gouge’s latest book is a shift into new territory.
“After The Rehearsals” is a prose poem narrative in which the poems – although they stand on their own – are akin to chapters in a work of fiction. Reading them sequentially draws the reader into the lives of the book’s characters. Writing in this way, we get to the essence behind the narrative much more readily, and uncover a story told through a composite of sharp and memorable images.
9781999784034
Punctuations from History
“Punctuations from History” is a volume that in various ways explores our place in, and relation to, history. Whilst there are similarities in theme to his collection “Human Archaeology” (which debuted at the 2017 Ripon Poetry Festival), the threads tying these pieces together are looser, more fluid
In an unusual departure, “Punctuations from History” contains brief ‘context commentaries’ that provide the reader with a foothold into the individual poems: “an attempt to offer up a literary trowel to allow the reader to get below the surface of the poem more readily”.
Overall, the collection tries to assist with unravelling notions of “how we were / or how we are now / or how we might yet be”; fragments or mirrors offered up from our ‘punctuated history’.
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Human Archaeology
Although Ian Gouge has been writing for many years, he still suffers from that common complaint felt by all writers at one time or another – namely, the nagging uncertainty around the quality and relevance of their work. ‘Human Archaeology’ is his first collection of new poetry since ‘Collected Poems (1979-2016)’ (pub. 2017).
The themes and preoccupations of ‘Human Archaeology’ crystallised as the new poems began to gather themselves into something approaching a coherent whole. The examination of history and its artefacts is probably a wholly appropriate subject given that some of the pieces were crafted from ‘found’ material – much in the same way perhaps as an Archaeologist assembles and then displays fragments found through their excavations.
Praise for ‘Human Archaeology’:
“a compelling exploration of the meaning of memory and history” – Hamish Wilson
“an imaginative archaeology that is personal, social and cultural…an interesting, special form of poetic plate-spinning…a volume of poetry that deserves careful attention” – David McAndrew
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Shrapnel from a Writing Life
Above all else, this is the story of a journey.
Over the last thirty-seven years or so, across a number of hand-written journals, I have been keeping what might be termed a record; although on reflection, even the word ‘record’ is something of a misnomer.
Relating to my ambition ‘to be a Writer’, the notebooks offer a compendium of thoughts, ideas, plans, ruminations, decisions (needed, taken, and not taken), aspirations, failings and disappointments. And the occasional success!
Their contents also represent a quest for that which always seemed just within reach – but more often than not remained entirely elusive.