Alan is a poet, playwright, novelist, Times feature writer, diarist, humourist, musician and winner of four major poetry competitions in the last three years!

‘...(Alan’s) poems show a great ear, exude a terrific confidence and imaginative freedom - and a reckless, romantic drama that you’d have to have a heart of stone to remain unmoved by.” Don Paterson

‘Franks’ songs are wonderfully true, complex, addictive things. I wish I could think, write and play like him....This is the real thing I promise.’ Jake Thackeray


Alan performed at the Bakehouse on Saturday April 28th 2007 as part of an evening of poetry and songs to launch Markings 24

There is an Absence

There is an absence in the gracious grid
Of avenues and spacious squares which form
The basis of the old town; nothing to do
With the plaques that gathered to proliferate
And mark the lives of great, pre-occupied men
Once housed here while their minds were out in the fields
Of physics, engineering and the arts,
Nor with the way that departed people go
As the shades of them weather further from the mauve.
No, what‘s missing here and, frankly, thank
The Lord, is something to commemorate
Our passing through, that day we lost the path
At the edge of the park because of our great distraction,
Because of the greenery turning to grains of sand,
Then vanishing into the pinched waist of winter.
It stands at the verge of the square on its plinth of grass
And is a single vertical rip in the air,
A rough and hand-made tear which strikes the eye
As being as shrill and modern as tomorrow,
Yet marks the spot of the soundless English scream.

Alan Franks

Water

I wonder when the plain taste of this water
Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself,
And the glass tumbler will finally leave
My lips unparted by its heavy rim.

Forty years since he went without a word,
Collapsing in a startled stranger‘s arms,
The appearance of comedy played out on a platform
Of the station in a northern conference town.

I wonder when I will fold away the letter,
The one he must have sent that autumn morning
And which arrived the day after I heard
From the modern but still inadequate headmaster.

Forty days of shock, said my mother‘s doctor,
Take a couple of these last thing at night.
I wonder when the plain taste of this water
Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself.

Drinking and drying have their own convergence,
Making current shapes which shed their forms.
At every drought the spires of rubble show
From the small town which the reservoir overran.

I wonder when the uncovering of sadness
Will break its habit of bringing into range
A shallow dish of something slurping sideways
And the clunk of cutlery on refectory wood.

Time out of town still wears its blameless face
As sheep sharpen the crescent blade of the hill
And headwaters muster underneath the ground
And streams shift slowly into stone.

In the pavement puddle almost as thin
As the skin on a cup of tea the petrol rainbow
Is standing at my shoulder while the wobbly
Moonface waits and waits to recompose.

Salt and woodgrain, rain again and guttering,
Trees divesting, drain leaf litanies.
I wonder when the plain taste of this water
Will pass for the last time, not to repeat itself.

© Alan Franks

More of the poetry of Alan Franks, as well as prose and interviews with him are featured in Markings 24

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