Author(s): Philip Hancock

Poetry | CB Editions

No skimping. In their quiet but fierce attention to  the unsung and the overlooked – paint splashes,  tea stains, silences – Philip Hancock’s poems reveal the histories and horizons of entire lives.

‘Philip Hancock’s poems tap a deep vein of humiliation – humiliations of place and class and aspiration, and also that thudding-in-the-ears fear of being seen. Of being rumbled, almost. It’s a fear that transcends class, but which is also so much to do with being patronised and dealing with rage . . . Some of these verses are like little parables seen in reverse – as in those paintings where there’s some big Biblical personage in the front, but ordinary household stuff going on in the background,
and it’s that stuff that matters.’
    – Will Eaves

‘Work is the site for thought and it’s a world of scaffolders, apprenticeships and the relief of the inside job that Hancock returns to, his unity of backdrop a means of demonstrating his style: subtle shifts of light and compressed, visual stage directions, which speak to wider concerns.’
    – Declan Ryan
 
From previous reviews of Philip Hancock’s poetry:

‘Phil Hancock’s insights are precise and authentic – he is part of the great tradition of writers who capture the true spirit of working-class life.’
     – Ken Loach

‘True originality: he writes with the sparkling eye of one who has discovered a rich and unaccountably neglected subject for poetic investigation.’
     – Christopher Reid

Philip Hancock was born in Newchapel, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1966. He left school at sixteen to serve a City & Guilds craft apprenticeship. His debut pamphlet Hearing Ourselves Think (Smiths Knoll, 2009) was a Guardian Book of the Year. A second pamphlet, Just Help Yourself (Smiths Knoll), appeared in 2016. Jelly Baby, a film-poem, screened at various short film festivals and was published by Areté. City Works Dept. was published by CBe in 2018.