New book of verse explores our mortality

PLYMOUTH poet Brian Herdman has penned a wonderful new collection of verse which deals with politics, ageing and mortality.

- By WILLIAM TELFORD

Brian’s Dead White Male is his second collection published by Plymouth’s high-class Shoals of Starlings Press.

It is packed with power and emotion across 101 poems, including the awesome Politics, Succession and Accidental Birth.

It has been called a “highly personal series of meditations /reflections on sickness, health, morality and memory.”

And many of the poems, including the title piece, address themes such as growing old, running out of time and facing up to the end.

Brian is 79 and wrote all the poems since his superb collection 78 45 33 came out in 2021.

“I didn’t start with any particular idea,” he said. “I don’t know why I called it Dead White Male, but it was partly because I'm an old guy.

“There is the feminist trope that literature is just dead, white, men, I put myself in that bracket. In the process of writing these poems I was thinking about that.”

Brian said the poems in