The View From the Villa Delirium

Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow, lived in north London for many years, and now lives in east Sussex, where he in known as the Beach Bard of St. Leonards.

In London, he was active in a range of writers’ groups, including Camden Voices, Vertical Images, Islington Poetry Workshop, and Word For Word Writers Group.

Brian has been described as ‘a Glasgow-Irish post-Beat poet for the new millennium’.

He says these poems could not have been written in London, in his previous life, and he was surprised at the way his work changed, especially when the mermaids just showed up one day, and invited themselves in.

“These are enchanting poems full of mysticism, Buddhism and magic with a political and ecological edge, love poems, poems of longing, paeans to people and elegies to place. In The View from the Villa Delirium Docherty demonstrates his usual worldliness and dexterity in navigating the globe but here is a new wonder laid bare in his tribute to Hastings and the seaside ‘characters’ that live there providing proof , at least poetically speaking, that mermaids really do exist. “ - Cheryl Moskowitz

‘Brian Docherty’s new poems are immensely likeable and companionable in their curiosity, attentiveness and love of objects and other people. Again and again, he succeeds in "walk[ing] the town till I know where I am”. This sense of locality - on the south coast of Sussex or the western seaboard of the US - is the solid ground from which, in many startling poems (some visited by mermaids), Docherty pursues his wish to “redefine magic realism”. This fine book celebrates our inhabiting of the world as it is, then thrills us with the pleasures of the imagination.’ - Martyn Crucefix

‘In this, his eighth book, Brian Docherty offers us a feast of poems along a range of subjects, characterised by freshness of vision and detail; multi-faceted poems edged with joys and sadnesses poems sometimes playful and

humorous, but always at home to a humanity aware of the ironies. These are the poems of a traveller, contemporary in tone, and possessing great immediacy, as Docherty’s poetic eye carries all before it, whether the subject is a Ted Hughes’ fox, a Ming vase or landmarks on the south-east coast around Hastings.’ - Katherine Gallagher