Time at Hand (Trevor Maynard - Retrospective Voyages)

Retrospective Voyages Volume 8

This eighth volume, Time at Hand, is the sixth of my chronological retrospectives, covering my writing during 1984.

At this time, I was employed as a Civil Servant, however, I wrote a lot of poetry when I was meant to be working, producing four booklets via the kindness of government photocopiers. I not only sold to my immediate colleagues, but also to the wider staff of HMRC and the VAT office. Quite what my bosses thought of it I don’t know, but there are several writers who spent their salaried hours as Civil Servants, for example Philip Larkin, and infamously, Quentin Crisp.

Some of the poetry from the booklets has previously been published in Volume One of Retrospective Voyages: ‘Pathways’, while a further 46 poems from 1984 were included in Volume Two of Retrospective Voyages: ‘songs’. This volume gathers the remaining unpublished poems, and for context a further 14 poems selected from ‘Pathways’ and ‘songs’, included in the appendix as bonus material. I hope this will give a very clear idea of where my work was going in 1984.

For me, I think it was the monotony and pointlessness of the tasks I was assigned to, which freed my mind to wander, swoop, and dive into flights of poetic fantasy: effectively to escape the day to day of life. You may wonder how boring could such a job be, well, one of my tasks was to simply count documents, and when I had finished counting them, drill a hole through them in order to identify them as being counted.

Suffice to say I, and my colleagues: twenty or so kids in their first job, fresh out of education, aged 17 to 21, took to celebrating whenever and however we could. Events such as the rehousing of a pot plant from a small pot to a bigger pot; the creation of paperclip fences with bulldog clip border controls across facing desks; and the acquiring of many a photograph and illustration of an armadillo from the local library, led to the formation of a drinking club in honour of said creature.

Armadillo memorabilia, Polaroids, and samples of cakes from any birthday, promotion, or other celebratory event were kept in a scrapbook to the point of rotting and decay. Anything for an excuse to go to the pub for lunch, the evening, and at weekends, as well as frequent the Customs and Excise Bar in the workplace.

In addition to poetry, I also wrote and published a series of absurd science fiction short stories based on my work colleagues imagined alternate lives in a galaxy far, far away. One could argue, I had time at hand.

"Trevor Maynard combines complicated thematic material and united fractured images with a sure hand" (The Stage)

While Retrospective Voyages is a cataloguing of Maynard's work, charting his progress up to the age of 24, his contemporary collections from 2000 onwards curate his mature work. The latest THREE SCORE, is a milestone collection, reviewed variously as "...galvanic and pertinent..." and "...the unravelling of established structures in poetic form".

Trevor is the founder and curator of POETRY, REVIEW, AND DISCUSS, a major professional poetry forum on LINKEDIN, with over 27,000 members sharing hundreds of new poems and comments each month.