Fear Of Thunder

From Fear Of Thunder

When Grandma heard thunder’s first throaty murmer
She threw down her duster, or let dishes clatter in the sink,
grabbed Dad’s hand and ran to the foot of the stairs.
Protected from the storm by a windowless door
she sang him Blue Moon in a trembling voice,
trying to drown the dark rumble,
holding him like a comfort blanket

Andrew Forster’s first collection confronts wide-ranging themes with clarity and artistry. In Fear of Thunder the reader meets a diverse selection of characters and situations: the young girl in a cul-de-sac who dreams she is a horse; a father unable to shake a childhood fear; the air force pilot who refuses to fly. Yet whether Forster is conjuring up a horse-whisperer hounded for his gifts or thinking about the poet Elizabeth Bishop taking stock in Carolina, he is at all times asking us to consider our common experiences.

From the industrial South Yorkshire of the poet’s childhood to his adopted home of rural Scotland, via imaginative leaps to Spain, America, Germany and eighteenth-century rural England, these poems look at what makes us who we are.

These poems of people, places, and people in places...have the visual power of paintinga and the depth and narrative structure of novels.
— Vicke Feaver

Reviews of Fear Of Thunder

	29 February 2008
Thunder is enlightening
Reviewer: Richmond, Keith Publication: Tribune
...he writes, not of great expectations but of dreams, desires and hopes unfulfilled. He's good on regret...and he's terrific on childhood. He's not wistful and he doesn't do nostalgia: instead he's evocative, perceptive and warm, as in Grades where he frets about exam results and in Brothers where, after arguing about Sheffield Wednesday and Rotherham United, "as a bus crested the hill we chased Olympic gold". Richmond, Keith

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