Paul Lester

The title of this collection and of some the individual pieces in it suggests that a number of these poems were destined for musical treatment: 'The Song of Superman', 'The Song of the Life Support Machine', 'Song of the Sheet Metal Man', and indeed many have made it onto vinyl and CD. These also include 'Be Kind to Worms' Week', 'A Bad Day at the City', 'I Dreamt I was in a Commercial', 'Brain Damage Blues', 'Bad Eyesight', amongst others published here for the first time.

Comic verses dealing with a dog-dominated dystopia, with hardly a canine pun that's left unpunished.

Seventeen-year-old golf prodigy Frank seems ready to blaze his way into Masters Tournament history, but his college plans are jeopardized by his father's sponsorship plans that threatens to ruin Frank's amateur status.

Set in the 1960s, this work of fiction focuses in on working life in a small diamond tool-making firm in the industrial midlands of England. Explored are the details of the work-processes, and the relations and interactions of the various characters populating that curious,claustrophobic world-within-a-world - characters which even include, it seems, the very diamonds themselves, devious,rebellious,recalcitrant. In this working culture can be found dark humour,anger,frustration and a confusion of hopes, dreams and resistance. It is the sort of culture that has been too rarely tackled in mainstream literary fiction.

Satirical verse, including, among other offerings, 'Babycare', 'Jason of Argent' and 'The Elephant in the Room'.

The tale of Captain Dread, the low-life, one-legged drug dealer, who sells the narrator a human skull and bribes him to an act of vengeance; all is not as it seems when it comes to the stickiness of Dread's demise.

The title poem is a parody on Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving But Drowning', and other poems here, most with a strong satiric bent, include 'Pill Power','Lunar Eclipse Over Edgbaston Reservoir', 'The Night They Murdered Soccer', 'Let Me Be in Your B-Movie','Yes, I Remember the Ui589' and 'Umbrella Monster,.

A section of Lester's Ph.D thesis (see Myths,Monsters and Popular Science: A Cultural Study), revised for publication to be a self-contained study, examining the history and meaning of the great sea-serpent phenomena, from the earliest cultures to modern times. This includes the 18th century Bishop Pontopiddan and the early religious agenda, the occupational folklore of whalers,fishermen and sailors, and he goes on to analyse the nineteenth century amplication beyond the boundaries of folklore and the interpretations involved in new press and scientific interests. Lester goes on the study various other comparable monster phenomena, deconstructing the notion of sea-serpents and certain narrowly empiricist notions of science.

Hair-raising title poem for the follically challenged, with other poems, with a satiric bent, including 'Mr Whiston', 'A Hole In One for Egon Ronay', Setting for a Letter'. 'The City Centre's Last Starling', 'The Good Christian Businessman Faxes a Prayer', 'Smothering Sunday: a Smack at Greetings' Card Verse', 'A Factory Rat's Resussitation' and 'Cripple in the Litter Bins,.

A small collection of verse, which includes, among others, the poems 'The Cricket Bat's Lament', 'Memory Bird', and 'I Guessed That Gemini Was Your Sign'.

OPH-264

Brings together for the first time the poems 'Be Kind To Worms' Week', 'The Reign of the Duck' and 'The Day of the Dog'. Also included are illustrations.

Apart from the title poem, which is in characteristically satiric mode,there are poems about a bird park which is not what it seems;the appearance of a mysterious computer programme accasioning a poem; working in sewers; 'The Tale of the Pub Newt' is a comic and unlikely barroom epic yarn about a reptile found in a pint of beer, and other poems include the wonders of op scars and, somewhat weirdly,how the poet once fell in love with a lightbulb ('of the pearl incandescent kind, of course').

The 'monsters' grouped together in this work have an easily recognisable similarity - they are all hairy ape-like creatures which pose different different degrees of challenge to human categorisations and expectations. Included are several putative creatures deemed to be on the outer fringes of scientific acceptibility. the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, Loy's Ape, and there are two avowedly fictional monsters - King Kong and the Yahoo. This work continues Lester's project on the analysis of cultural meanings of monsters, evidenced in 'The Meaning of the Loch Ness Monster' and 'The Great Sea Serpent Controversy'.

A comic verse saga fortified with a 'cat-alogue' of feline puns.

The narrator of this tale, Maxi, is set outside the Central Library in a city of the Midlands of England when he is accosted by a youth who insists he is Mexican in spite of evidence forthcoming that he actually comes from Kashmir in Pakistan. The narrator himself has somewhat of a yearning to believe his new found friend.In all these crises of identity there are twists and turns, with Maxi actually hankering after being a Mexican too.....