Freeze Frame

A poetry collection about life and love presented in Kindle, Print and Audio book formats. Freeze Frame brings together six international poets and a composer, each with their own vision of what would appear in the static frame if we captured the flow of our ceaseless contemporary narrative. A selection of poems edited by Oscar Sparrow and performed by each poet so the reader/listener may experience the full presence and intention of the poetsFreeze Frame captures the essence of the poet in this private audience poetry performance - each recorded in their home locations in England, USA and Italy.Whether you are seeking an inspirational quote or a cutting edge intellectual concept, Freeze Frame is a unique collection of short poems allowing you to step aside and perhaps hit the pause button of your own rushing life.We are born without language into a world of tears, mystery, sounds, shapes, light and dark. Slowly words begin to allow us individual expression. For the poet, this process never stops. The quest for words with which to capture the sound of wind in trees, an echo on a lonely city street, an unexpected jolt of joy, and on and on.....is the quest and frustration of the poet. Whether it is the nuance of a relationship or the clatter of a factory machine, we seek to hold them so that they may be seen, maybe for just long enough to make a little more sense of them. By sense of course, I mean perhaps beauty, pathos, symmetry and on through an infinity of inadequate dictionaries. Freeze Frame is a project arising from my own experience as a poet. We live in a multi-channel world. Poetry is no longer a mainstream medium and we should not be surprised at this. Our lives are dominated by work and survival. We can click on any film we wish to watch, or hear any song that was that was ever composed. So what could poetry do that was special? My response was that it could provide a tiny pause in the great evolving video of our time. Perhaps it was worth freezing the frame. I invited five other writers to contribute to this collection. The great thing about other poets is that they are not me. They are free of my own influences and prejudices. I also invited a musician to listen to the poems and compose a piece to blend the personalities and freeze the frame on each of the poets. The result is a stunning piano composition with 6 individual motifs, that stand alone but which also blend together in the title track for the audio book.I thank all of them for their preparedness to join this mission. Watch the launch video... get the flavour of Freeze Frame - meet the poets and hear the music, on Oscar Sparrow's author page, click his name just below the title at the top of this page and find the video on the far right under the blog. Out there in the ether there are the images, the metaphors, the juxtapositions and the rhythms that say just a little more than the words alone. Why not take a look at a few of the poems - scroll up and click on LOOK INSIDE!
About the Author: I am Oscar Sparrow, editor of this anthology. I was born in 1949 as the sonic boom of jets and babies began to draw a new world map of umbilical vapour trails. The Eleven Plus exam revealed I could not even count to eleven. I became a mechanic, labourer, truck driver and boxer. I read Wordsworth and Ford Cortina manuals in a lorry cab near both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Eventually I found myself in London with the Metropolitan Police. Car chases and riots followed but I did not take it personally. Throughout all this time I was a would be poet, short story writer and novelist. Paul Tobin is an English poet part of a tradition stretching back to John Clare. He has a quality of modesty and calm which can edge towards the melancholic understatement of Philip Larkin or Simon Armitage. His work has utter human warmth even in a grey sky day. He is never bigger than the subject and always reminds one of the Chinese question and answer -'Why do all rivers come to the sea? Because he is always lower than them.' Jo VonBargen is an American poet from Texas. Her imagery is as big as the sky. She has passion and a wry sense of humour. She knocks words together and finds sparks where you didn't think there was flint. Her range is from bar rooms to the edge of the galaxy. She is pure poet rock with all the authentic impurities. Jefferson Hansen is from Minneapolis USA. He is the editor of the Altered Scale online arts magazine. He can be avant-garde, conservative, experimental or traditional. He raises abstract notions that one had just not considered. He is an artist in pursuit of art. He has made me think thoughts that I would not have thought without his mind. Claude Nougat lives in Rome. She is a linguist, novelist, painter, essayist, poet, journalist and economist. In her busy life she had not set aside a drawer full of poems. Instead she set out into the streets of Rome to focus on some famous locations frozen in the era of their creation.resulting in a philosophical and reflective work, suffused with a sense of transcendent time. Candy Bright represents another tradition in English poetry, that of the emotion in events and relationships. Her poems are centred on people and their landscapes. There is love, but often a sense of loss, impermanence and regret. Where there is innocence, it is threatened. Her poems are not casual comments. What you get here is a fellow being telling you how it feels and finding a key to your own emotion.