Kitchen 12.07 a.m. by Julian Flanagan

Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., is Julian Flanagan’s second collection. Many first appeared in magazines such as The Spectator, Ambit, The Rialto, The Reader, Envoi, Iota, and The Manchester Review. His poems have been short-listed in the Teignmouth Festival and Plough Poetry Prizes.

Mario Petrucci described Flanagan’s first collection as “Flecked with arresting imagery, Cooking with Cancer looks and looks again…it refuses to flinch.” (Although Kitchen, 12.07 a.m., comes cancer-free, wrote Julian.)

His poems can be pithy -

    Apart

We tap text, puncture separation
with a line of drill heads: xxxxx

- celebratory, or elegiac. Preacher-haunted motorways lie beside sleeping Queen bees waiting to govern; a baby struggles through her first breaths; the Tardis jumps a middle-aged man back to his Cheshire childhood; a lawnmower cuts the air in a Jamaican stairwell; a boiler ticks reassuringly through the small hours.

A freelance journalist, Flanagan wrote for The Times, Time Out, FT Weekend, FT Magazine, The Daily Telegraph and economist.com. His articles include interviews with Don McCullin, Ralph Steadman, Stella Rimington, Jack Straw, Susan Hill, Billy Bragg and Howard Jacobson; and reportage on the unsung heroes of London’s 7/7 bombings, a dawn run in Florence, Dubai’s late night Ramadan cricket tournaments, beer and breakfast in Smithfield, and Soweto’s first health spa.

After correcting the proofs of this book, Julian Flanagan passed away on 29 August 2018.