Described in the Telegraph as 'Huddersfield's Melville', Milner Place has spent much of his life sailing the seven seas as a skipper of a trading boat, while also writing beautifully crafted poetry. His two pamphlet collections. The CONFUSION OF ANGELS and WHERE SMOKE IS, has sold out and been reprinted, and this (at the age of sixty) is his first full length collection, Simon Armitage's first acquisition for the Chatto Poetry list. Place's poems have an international or universal quality, influenced by Neruda and Rilke rather than Auden: they are lyrical and wise, rather than quotidian and clever. Some of the poems are sea-going yarns, others are set in South America and read like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in verse. There are also a handful of characters portraits, and a wonderful long poem, 'Lum Street', based on a row of terraced houses, its tenants and their relationships to each other. IN A RARE TIME OF RAIN is a powerful and assured first collection, and brings an unusual new voice into British Poetry.
Milner Place's remarkable first full-length collection of verse reflects a lifetime of travel and observation, with poems collected from all four points of the compass. Whether reporting scenes from a Mexican village of the African interior, in the Andes or the rainforest, reliving life on the high seas, or recording the mythology of West Yorkshire street life, his style is entirely his own, not least in his use of apparently inexhaustible images.
These are swashbuckling narratives, wry character portraits and meditations that carry a worldly wisdom which extends far beyond the settings and subjects of the poems themselves. IN A RARE TIME OF RAIN opens up a startling new perspective on the world, and marks the arrival of a unique new voice in contemporary poetry.
Milner Place was born in Yorkshire and is in his early sixties. He has spent most of his life as the skipper of trading vessels and yachts. He has published poems in Spanish and English in numerous periodicals and journals. He lives in Huddersfield
