Thomas Nicholas
These poems are clever and revealing.
- Laurie Boucke, author of the Undutchables

What a treat reading these poems.
- Inez van Eijk, Dutch author and anthologist
Mokeham

Traffic wardens clamp the cars
Of the foreign tourists who
Come to see the Polish whores
In their frilly lingerie


This long poem takes you on a walk through the city. You meet hookers and panhandlers, office clerks and lager louts. But on the trip from Central Station to the posh residential areas, traversing the red light district and immigrant neighbourhoods, you will also encounter Burns, Shakespeare, Auden, Eliot, Heaney and other great masters.

Mokeham, like the other places in "Under the Low Grey Sky" is as real as can be. The reader who knows the Netherlands will discover Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Bijlmer, Abcoude, Baambrugge, Breukelen and many other Vechtstreek villages behind the English sounding names.

But "Under the Low Grey Sky" is not only for people who know Holland. Suburbia is universal and the shopkeepers and commuters, doctors, lawyers and bankers that the poet introduces, are recognisable to all.


From
The Commuter:

I write a long memo I don't want to write,
While talking about the time that I spent
Watching the televised football last night
With children and wife.




Copyright 2000, 2001 Thomas Nicholas
Read More Excerpts or order the book

Links:
The Undutchables
Penticton, BC
Contact the poet:
thonich@yahoo.com
Thomas Nicholas
Box 20074
Penticton, BC V2A 8K3
Canada
About the poet:
Thomas Nicholas lives in Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. He spent many years in the Netherlands and this collection of poems is his farewell to that soggy land full of contradictions.
Bamebridge

It seems a pretty tranquil place,
A friendly village by a stream,
But late at night the witches race
Their broomsticks through the Bamebridge sky,
While a hundred inbred natives dream
About the Sabbath and the Grace
Predestiny has in store for them.