A member of Stockport Write Out Loud Group, David Keyworth, has published his first pamphlet collection. The Twilight Shift is available from Wild Pressed Books.  

David was born in West Bromwich but grew up in North Lincolnshire – and his first published poem was on a beer mat. Since then, he has been published in The SHOp, Smiths Knoll, Orbis, South Bank Poetry and in 2012 won the poetry category in Salford University’s WriteNorthWest competition. The title poem of his collection was published in the anthology Poems for Grenfell Tower by Onslaught Press, 2018.

In 2013, at the Northern Writers awards, he was awarded a New Poets Bursary to participate in a development programme produced by the Poetry School and led by poet Clare Pollard. In 2018 he completed an MA in creative writing from the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

The poems in his collection focus on “deserted night-time streets, airports and twilit railway stations  … haunted by the narrative presence as well as by the spirits of the unseen, always only just out of reach. Filmic themes intersperse with echoes of the not-yet-happened and the in-some-future-they-will-never-happen-again.”

The award-winning poet Esther Morgan has said of his debut collection: “Homelessness – literal and metaphorical – haunts the streets of David Keyworth’s atmospheric collection. In these concise, finely judged poems we meet characters cut adrift from their own lives – like the lost soul of ‘No More Departures’ waiting at the station for a future that never arrives.  Keyworth is particularly effective at capturing those momentary interactions which make up so much of contemporary life – and which can make ghosts of us all. Highly recommended.”

In an interview about his collection, David said: "I relate closely to the voices in most of the poems, especially, for example, ‘Reading the Great Gatsby at McDonalds’ as it is 90% true.  In other poems like ‘Garden Apples’ and ‘No more departures tonight’ I adopted a character to speak through and so those poems are true in a different way."

PHOTOGRAPH: EMMA WRIGHT