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Tim Cumming -
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Tim Cumming’s poems have been published widely in Britain and America, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and The Independent. His work has been broadcast on BBC radio and TV, and he featured in the New Voices season at the South Bank. He lives and works in London.

“The speed is fast, the language sharp, the imagery surprising. These poems read like a Thesaurus of brilliant one- liners held together in a tentative and unstable world. Things happen, seemingly at random, to desparate protagonists forever dissolving into one another, and every one of them loses: partners, jobs, homes, identities, belief. Strange things happen to strange people, and they turn out to be us.” - Ken Smith

“Cumming seems to operate somewhere between Stannard and the Armitage/Sansom axis whilst avoiding the wildly surreal distortions of the one and the lapses into whimsy and inconsequentiality of the other. Cumming has a lot to say about England and his most satisfying work focuses on the last decade to produce a kind of homegrown political magic realism.” - Verse

“Tim Cumming is a real treasure... Sometimes the poems are as realistic as life is, and sometimes he builds up the absurdities and incongruities to create a world that's as unreal as life is.” - Poetry Review

***

The junior government minister
also big in plastics,
disconnects his microphone
and is led from the outside broadcast vehicle
to the ministerial car
and as the car drives away
he unwraps a pastry from a paper serviette
and eats it, cupping
his hand under his mouth
until the car reaches
a set of traffic lights
and a panhandler with a rag and bucket
steps out to wipe the windscreen.
As the lights change to amber
he steps to the driver's window
and knocks on the glass.
The minister leans forward
to speak to the driver
as the car inches forward with the traffic
and without turning the driver
unlocks the rear door
and the panhandler jumps in,
smothering the minister's face with the rag,
and the car drives off at speed.

Tim Cumming
Contact Print.
Wrecking Ball Press
ISBN 1-903110-10-6