How does a writer confirm? There is a argument I’ve read somewhere that the beginning of all writing in whatever form is a attempt not to confirm with everything else they have read as well as a homage to their favourite writers. Certainly in my case when I started writing poetry properly say 10 or 11 years ago, I was obsessed with Hugo Williams’s haunting poetry book about affairs ‘Hugo’s Rain’ or any number of Paul Auster’s books which I’ve read listed somewhere else as “In many cases by the names of characters who appear in more than one novel, but above all by their abstraction and ambiguity and by their intertwining themes: the role of chance and coincidence and the unstable nature of identity”
Michael John Holme’s new book ‘I am / Conforming by nonconformity’ is of course nothing like Paul Auster or Hugo Williams but I think does in its own way talk about unstable nature of identity. In this book, Michael as a author argues that unique differences, ironically iron us which talks about identity in a somewhat difference way.
In this all too short little collection of a little over 40 pages, Michael talks about choices or as his wife says at the end of this book there are too many choices nowadays which I think back to the 1980s when I was growing up back at school everybody used to get the same seven inch single, listen to the same music, and as the late 1980s beckoned the dreaded flares (Thankfully there is no pictures left now of those horrible days – lol).
It would be wrong of me to say to rush out and buy this book as I rarely write reviews to tell you to go and do such things, but Michael’s book is a book is almost a expectation to the rule as it almost like he wants to look at life in a different way to the fragmented nature of the way society is nowadays and reject getting what he calls Achilles Heels slowing you down with your life.
I certainly didn’t agree with all of what he said, but it made me think and therefore in my own may will keep encouraging me to keep confirming by nonconformity.
Fascinating stuff.
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