Untitled Document

"BRITAIN'S DREAMING" (BOOK)
& "BOUDICCA; BRITAIN'S DREAMING" (CD)

'Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming' (56 minutes) was recorded with my punk vocal band/ theatre troupe Never Mind The Testoerone; Here Comes Boudicca. My least commercial album and easily my personal favourite, it records and mixes three differently terrified performances, - an early studio version, a peak outdoor live-and-wildly-kicking performance just after we'd stormed out of the Glastonbury Festival in a justified but now wryly regretted show of principle and the farewell performance at the UEA Studio, Norwich. A whole summer of noise in the mix. If you don't want to follow the crowd, if you're only going to buy one of my efforts, and if you like history, great women and punk rock, buy this.

"mesmerising rhythms" (Eastern Daily Press)

Purchase Information
To purchase 'Britain's Dreaming' or 'Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming' visit the purchase page.

Frontier Publishing Press Release
“Britain’s Dreaming” is published by Frontier Publishing at £6.95. It features selections from three of Gareth Calway’s new collections.

The first is the nine poem story of Boudicca and the Iceni revolt against Roman law, with modern punk-rock parallels. These poems are extracted from the lyrical, gutsy and raw performance “Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming” with which the poet and his acting troupe tour the country.
Secondly, “Mountain Ashes,” a 13-poem sequence, tinged with regret and humour, about his teenage years in South Wales, as well as poems about teaching and his arrival in East Anglia .Finally, “The Way of Love” is altogether less specific, a group of ghazals and sonnets which speak of love for the Indian mystic Meher Baba. A ghazal is a Persian/Urdu love lyric of couplets with prescribed metre and rhyme pattern. “The Way Of Love” includes “Angel” which was televised in Hindi Picture/Channel 4’s National Ghazal Finals and later recorded by Gabriella Tal.

The development, tour and publication of “Britain’s Dreaming” all received the support of Eastern Arts. Asked about his new book, Mr Calway said, “Living through Britain in the 80s was like living through an age without dreams. The ‘Dreaming’ of the title refers to all the things we sacrificed during that mean little decade on the altar of the market: ideas, imagination, creativity. All the things the British are rather good at.”
Frontier Publishing Press Release, Oct 1998.

HQ Poetry Magazine
“Gareth is the kind of performance poet you don’t argue with. His masked poetry show Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming has been doing the provincial rounds to much acclaim and is available on tape and CD and now makes up about a third of his new book Britain’s Dreaming. In the more personal poems which make up the rest of the book is to be found some very fine poetry indeed; poetry that resonates and sticks in the mind. I particularly liked Norfolk Seen from The Welsh Mountains and the poem Marked For Life where Mr Calway describes his old English teacher: “Your lipstick and powder applied as explosively/ As your blistering pen.” At £6.95, the book is very good value and so durably bound that it would survive the detonation of a small thermonuclear device. “Tongues of fire could purge/ the iron in the soul/ at Pontypool inferno” but not out of this book.”
Kevin Bailey, HQ Poetry Magazine.

Eastern Daily Press
Gareth’s latest book 'Britain’s Dreaming' (Frontier Publishing) and CD 'Boudicca; Britain’s Dreaming: The Anarchy Tour' grew out of a successful touring production of his gutsy verse drama about Boudicca’s revolt against the Romans. Sliding in and out of different time frames, the poems pack a powerful punch - percussive diction, mesmeric chants and rhythms, words repeated over and over like a pulse or someone hammering a stone.

the Iceni queen is brought noisily to life: “I love her fecundity/ The fact that she wouldn’t hide the power/ Of earth words in a Latin fudge like fecundity.

Gareth’s ear for rhythm is particularly striking. In one poem, the repetition “Boudicca, boudicca, boudicca” was composed in the pumping rhythms of his daily cycle ride along a Roman road to work.”
Simon Proctor, EDP What’s On June ’99

“A play with poetry and punch, a rare celebration of one of Norfolk’s great women and one of Britain’s unsung heroines.”
Trevor Heaton, EDP Main Feature August 1998

The thoughts of a Celtic lover of Boudicca in the rhythms of the late Ian Dury, Johnny Rotten and the Clash.
“New Times”, May 2000

Gareth follows the Boudicca section with a selection dealing with his adolescence in Wales and the fate of heavy industry. The final section, “The Way of Love is a Tightrope,” strikes a different tone, with love poems which hover somewhere between the romantic and the mystical.”
Simon Proctor