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And Now… Some Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ve been delighted that my Crashaw-Prize winning début has been earning glowing reviews over the past six months. My work has been compared to: Bill Callahnan, William Faulker, Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy, Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder, Charles Simic, Edward Hopper, Barry Lopez, A.R. Ammons, Carson McCullers and Bruce Springsteen. The latter is my own damned fault and the rest are pretty ridiculous but certainly flattering. Here’s some choice excerpts which, I hope, will encourage you to go ahead and gamble on this little book of mine.

‘this collection seems to be at the forefront of a shift to something new, it is on the way to a perfection of some new movement…’
– The Glasgow Review

Most recently Isabel Galleymore at Eyewear said:

John Glenday is right to link Van Winkle’s poems to paintings of Edward Hopper’s, and it is possible to extend this comparison to the voyeurism inherent to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (a poem such as ‘The Apartment’ makes this clear just from its form on the page). Yet Van Winkle’s insight into natural, cultural and social processes finds him surprisingly comparable to writers such as Barry Lopez and A. R. Ammons when he describes, at the end of ‘Retrieving the Dead’, how one should ‘lift the soldiers up, try not to breathe till they’re tossed/into our trenches of tea bags, messed diapers, spare parts.’ Indeed, Van Winkle’s poems are not static portraits of men and women framed in windows or doorways, but poems with characters that move within their environments and which, with their histories, move the reader.

• You can read the rest of the review here.
• Recently reviews also appeared from Colin McGuire and Northwords Now which are work checking out.
• Ryan’s collection is available from Salt here.

Find out why Gutter Magazine called this collection an ‘ incandescent book to keep at your bedside for dark winter nights.’