Books

When I look at my early work now, stretching back to the 1970s, it almost seems to become a form of archeology; peering in through a tiny hole in some lately discovered wall to find forgotten, yet "wonderful things". To solve this problem – the enviable problem of undiscovered books – I published two volumes which form the vanguard of my poetry, the first book being a short 'bridging volume' called 'Hope in the Heart of Hatred', featuring work predominantly from the 1990s. Although not my first book by any means, it was the first to be published. This 'bridging book' acts as a connection between my previous hoarded work and the new poems I am working on now. The newest poems have also seen the light of day in a book entitled 'Gain of Function'. My third book has also now been released and you can find more information on all these anthologies below.

This book of collected poems has grown in power and complexity over the last few years, becoming what might be called a bonded fusion of defined intent – a sort of new magic that began to stray across its own borders. It grew into the natural spaces between the individual poems to create something approaching a loosely epic story of pseudo-mythology, semi-autobiography and a broad gathering of observation. Peter Hague certainly manages to inject into his work a constant newness of unfailing excitement and you will be hard pressed to find a work of poetry written in current times that is more inventive, creative or searching. ‘Summer With The Gods’ is a poet displaying a landmark development of his talent – one that will define a period of re-invention which began to take place around 2016. His life experience over the previous decades had provided him with a much greater understanding of who he was, and what his place in the world might be and it gathered a new energy to his work that had a lot of fuel in the tank. ‘Summer With The Gods’ is just a part of this gathering of words, yet stands alone as an entertainment, as much as anything – a poet beginning to stretch his legs and move forward. Other poems from this period and developed from it, will emerge in due course.

'Hope in the Heart of Hatred' is a short book of twenty-nine poems, all written between 1989 and 2003. These varied poems sit together well as a single work and present what I think is an excellent introduction to what is yet to come. It also contains some of my own photography from the passing years, not in support of any particular poem, but to add a ghosted ambience of my life in art. It is a pivotal book because it is born of a time when I had largely given up seeing the sun rise on my literary career. However, instead of giving up I gave myself to it as never before. My world at the time was full of mistrust, disappointment and disillusion. There was also a permeation of fear and hatred that seemed to seep into the actual framework of living. I even hated myself at times. Given all this and the spectre of periodic depression, I remained positive and to some extent I learnt to write my way out of dark situations – thus giving them a logical purpose. So this book, above all other considerations, is essentially about hope.

This anthology of one-hundred and two poems represents a shift in creative potential which is exactly described by its title: ‘Gain of Function’, which you may well recognise as a phrase relating to science. However, within the sphere of this book, Gain of Function mostly represents a collision between past and future in which my long-developed ways of working have been hit by enormous positive change and new possibilities – all driven by the advent of social media and the seismic changes in the world of publishing.

The very recent work presented in this book is unique amongst my output, because for the first time I was faced with the possibility that whichever poem I was working on, it could be immediately presented to the public, and indeed to the world via social media. This new reality created a completely different working atmosphere. The sudden, tense focus of instantaneous publishing added a whole new factor of concentration, necessary confidence and embedded topicality – specifically the poems dealing with the recent virus and some aspects of politics and the media.

I hope you enjoy reading these poems and find them worthy investigations of the many questions and experiences we are faced with today. 



Although I have had a Twitter presence for a while now, in the last few years I have started to use it as a platform for releasing my very latest poems. This is an unusual experience for me because I tend to rewrite and edit my poems for a very long time, often years. Twitter has allowed me to experiment with a very fresh and dynamic new way of writing, sometimes on current subjects too, though I tend to stay away from the lefts and rights and bandwagons of the recent unsettling wave of identity based politics. It is dividing humanity, or at least allowing embedded divisions to widen, rather than heal.

Twitter offers me a live stage on which to perform and one of the most exciting things for me is the ability to be able to suddenly decide to put my work out into the public domain without all the structures, limitations and interruptions of normal publishing procedure. I have found it gives my work a desirable urgency and a powerful creative surge, while still allowing me to offer poetry of the highest standard that my friends and followers have come to respect from me.

I have now collected these dynamic poems into an anthology, which has been printed in traditional book form, along with many other poems that were written in the febrile atmosphere of Twitter, though never actually posted. Collectively, they make up my book entitled 'Gain of Function', which contains a hundred and two poems.