On the Beach with Chet Baker

“Presence and absence, some sort of together” (‘On the Beach with Chet Baker’). These are the three places that Robert Seatter’s second book of poems explores, with deftness, insight and artistry. They move from places of stasis and memory, through the uneasy proximities of love captured in the moody jazz trumpet of the title poem, and out to the uncharted spaces that loss and death can create. His arresting imagination is equally at home with the songs of Elvis Costello and Jacques Brel, a bizarre collection of BBC sound effects, Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction or the films of Fellini and Marilyn Monroe, right down to the more mundane details of a bad day at the computer, garden bonfires or the texture of toast…

Subtle, artful, intimate, these are appealing poems from a writer whose work is a flowering of his early promise.

Praise for On the Beach with Chet Baker;

"...emotional engagement in abundance". Clare Hudson, Planet, October 07

"Seatter writes sometimes with tremendous momentum which capture the thrill of a particular moment when life was lived with breathtaking intensity". Clare Hudson, Planet, October 07

Robert Seatter was educated at Oxford University and has worked variously as an EFL teacher in Italy and France, an actor, a journalist, in publishing and broadcasting. He lives in London where he currently works for the BBC.

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