Small Dreams of a Scorpion

"I’d read a lot of Spike Milligan before I read this. I read them in my teens and I’ve read all the Goon Show Scripts . I’d read all these comedy books and then this new book came out, so I got it the first week it came out. I was surprised because it was serious. The fact that he was so serious and that it made me laugh so much really impressed me, not only that he could be serious but that he wanted to be serious. I liked that. There was one particular poem in there, I think it’s You’re Ugly Said the Mirror , about a young girl looking in the mirror. I found it so devastating that within a short number of words Spike Milligan could make me cry. I think it’s only about twelve lines long, the piece. That book so excited my imagination, that by the end of it he had opened a new world to me. I think it’s because of that book that I became a poet. Not only was he funny, but also in the serious poetry, he’s accessible. And in a way, it’s not a million miles from the Liverpool poets or Adrian Mitchell – it’s within that, sort of, 1960s movement. He was using everyday language, rather than a more traditional poetic language, and was using domestic images and everyday experiences. Even though I was a lot younger and lived on a council estate in Nottingham, I could understand the images far more than a lot of the poetry that we were reading in school. Every poem in it is about sensitivity and about looking at the world in a different way. The whole book, it’s got one foot off the ground. It feels like you’re holding your breath while you read it and there was something about that, rather than this strident, “I know exactly what I’m doing, I’m telling you the world is like this”. It was asking a question, so I loved it."