Cai Draper's SPRUNG is an energetic and invigorating joyride through a few months in lockdown, 'a tortoise wrapped in blank verse' where Draper boldly admits 'I want to take MDMA with my mum / & listen to Everything But the Girl '. As fresh as a change of shirt, as bright as a newly polished button, this is poetry completely committed to Frank O'Hara's command to 'go on its nerve'. SPRUNG is an admirably animated pamphlet from an exciting young poet.
Cai Draper's SPRUNG is an energetic and invigorating joyride through a few months in lockdown, 'a tortoise wrapped in blank verse' where Draper boldly admits 'I want to take MDMA with my mum / & listen to Everything But the Girl '. As fresh as a change of shirt, as bright as a newly polished button, this is poetry completely committed to Frank O'Hara's command to 'go on its nerve'. SPRUNG is an admirably animated pamphlet from an exciting young poet.
His poems have appeared in Anthropocene, bath magg, PERVERSE, Tentacular, Lighthouse and elsewhere. He is poet in residence at the Book Hive where he founded and organises New Tricks poetry workshops and curates their Potluck Poetry packs. With Assembly House, he organises and hosts the international poetry reading series. In 2018 he completed an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at UEA, and he currently works in the university's Outreach department with local secondary school students.
Cai Draper's SPRUNG reads like a series of missives from the
particular emergencies of the present pierced constantly and set to
race or slow by the dull and dazzling lights and geographies of the
past. - Mira Mattar, The Bow
These poems kept me going through the weird first month of lockdown
in 2020, and have yielded something new on each rereading since.
Their surgical line breaks reel the reader in, making them stop and
go at will, through poems where the mundane everyday makes room for
moments of connection. Lines that touch on 'what isn't fully in
poetry' stretch themselves to host a multitude, and offer hope
that, even if this is 'the closest the world has ever seemed to
closing down', poems (whether dipped in chocolate sauce or not) are
strong and flexible enough to hold it open. - Ellen Dillon, Morsel
May Sleep
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