Korean Letters: Poems by David Cameron

Korean Letters: Poems by David Cameron

Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
Publication: January 2020
ISBN: 978-0957466982

David Cameron’s 2020 collection, Korean Letters, was described by Liz Lochhead as ‘moving, real, life-affirming, lucid… Everything I think poems should be’. It gathers together the poems written in the four years since his debut volume of poetry, The Bright Tethers. Its title poem (included in the anthology Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry) draws on letters written by Cameron’s late father, George, while on National Service in Korea. The book includes ‘In a Darker Vein’, a cycle of poems set to music by the Toronto-based composer, David Jaeger, and also ‘In the Epileptic Colony’, a long poem recording the intensity of Cameron’s former experiences working in a residential ‘hospital school’.

The Godfather 

When Michael Corleone walked with Kay
Through snowy New York streets at Christmas-time
Hours before life changed unalterably,
Setting the young war hero on the path
To infamy as a dead-eyed mafia don,
It was Christmas! In New York! In the snow!
The future must have seemed within his grasp
As surely as those gifts from Best & Co.

What a dull movie that life would have made.
Instead, Fate dealt the Devil from the Tarot,
So robbing him of spontaneity
(A devil can’t be careless) he became
A Method actor studying his own life.
On screen, it’s not The Bells of St Mary’s now:
He can’t be saved, though arm-in-arm with Kay
He walks through streets whose snow’s been washed away.

David Cameron was born in Glasgow in 1966 and now lives near Belfast. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry. He is the author of four books of fiction, three books of poetry, and a critical study of Samuel Beckett. The poet and critic Robert Nye described Cameron’s writing as possessing ‘a quality of verbal alchemy by which it transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold’.