Oliver James Lomax: Launch of new poetry collection

I Found God Alone and He Was Grieving’ by Oliver James Lomax is a collection of sobriety, death, prayer, class, labour and hard-won clarity.

Moving from Picasso’s Guernica in a Mancunian Ford showroom, from Little Lever to Stretford Leisure Centre, from SEND classrooms to meeting rooms, from relapse to repair, Lomax writes with a rare mixture of plain speech and spiritual voltage.

These poems are full of coal, clay, canal water, sandstone, cold mornings, old wounds and sudden grace: the poet holding a chicken while a child dances towards the stars, the Sagrada Família looking back towards Blackpool Tower, retrofitted with stone from a Lancashire quarry, and a prayer written at a pit disaster in 1835.

Lomax’s Aftershock asks what it means to be warm when you should be cold, to find serenity when the body screams ACTION, to remain malleable inside a memory, and, most of all, how to live with the clarity of being clean.