Announcing my new poetry collection ‘Poltergeists & Other Traumas’

I am so happy to announce that my new poetry collection will be available to purchase on Monday 8th April 2024. Published by Pan Piper Press, Poltergeists & Other Traumas is a collection of forty poems written over the past year.

About Poltergeists & Other Traumas

In his new collection of poems, Paull Blakeman explores the dark and complicated nature of trauma and its warping effect on identity. Through a selection of forty poems, he examines how trauma misshapes our young lives, how damaging unconscious behaviour can arise out of unprocessed traumatic experience, and how intergenerational trauma impacts us in minute and unexpected ways.

The collection opens with the titular poem ‘Poltergeist,’ settling on the image of a supernatural disturbance that tries to convey how unresolved trauma pollutes our sense of self, particularly during adolescence. This ghostly figure returns intermittently across forty poems that make reference to the Bible, Shakespeare, psychoanalytic theory, fairy tale, classical mythology, and the artworks of Vermeer, Frida Kahlo, and Edvard Munch.

Despite the ‘long night of the soul’ reading of this new work, there is a sense of triumph and victory in the closing poems ‘I Shall Anoint Myself,’ ‘Becoming Tiresias,’ and ‘Boy with a Pearl Earring.’ These poems offer a note of hope and wisdom gained from the bitterest experience that makes ‘Poltergeists & Other Traumas’ a vital contribution to the conversation on trauma and how it interfaces with poetic expression.