Recital: An Almanac (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

John Siddique's poetry takes the reader on a journey, crossing the border country between love and loss, he charts his family's untold stories. Interested in exploring opposite worlds and seeming contradictions, his poetry is a brilliant balancing act. Sometimes steamy, often moving, The Prize is a bold, brave book with a big, open heart.

John Siddique's writing is playful and poignant. It explores the complexities of a fragmented world – of sex, family, loss and dream-life – with such clear-eyed, unsentimental candour that I go back to certain poems time and again for another immersion. He's not afraid of writing about love, its pain and rewards, its sudden, shocking forces and darkly funny epiphanies – and his poems demonstrate a generosity and humanity so often lacking in more brittle, defensive writers.

His knowledge and love of poetry shines through.

ohn Siddique is a powerful, arresting and provocative new poetic voice, on the page, and off it. He writes with a rare combination of directness, ease, and authority and transports his audience through a gallery of moods and registers in just as wide a range of forms. His work is visceral, sensuous, searing, playful, and deeply moving.

John Siddique is one of Britain's most interesting and original poets. He probes the contradictory jumble of contemporary Britain revealing the daily heroism and bravery of the urban sprawl that he clearly knows well.

John Siddique is a poet who wants you to read his work, his writing isn’t a puzzle you have to figure out. Gathered in these pages is the work of an artist who believes in stories – our stories.

From the domestic realities of everyday life to a world distraught with crises and confrontation Recital looks at our lives over the space of a year. Drawing on inspiration from Grave’s ‘White Goddess,’ Siddique’s book uses the lunar cycle to tap into the intimate relations of the modern soul; our doubts, hesitations and need for meaning.

Glimpses of inspiration from Larkin, Cummings and Neruda inform the poetry here, but Siddique’s own voice takes those ways of looking at the world and sets out stories of who we are right now in the 21st century.

In a time when so many consider poetry to be of little relevance, here is a writer and a book that has never been more relevant to the questions of today and the people we are. Yet it is with a sensuous and loving eye that Siddique writes about secrets that we almost dare not think about. He reveals the quest for love and the spiritual meaning that underpins us.