evening Jean
evening Fiona
evening Ena
thank you Pauline
hi Jean
hi Fi
hi Ena
ta Pauline

Hovis Presley, ‘brief introduction’

Above is the first poem from Hovis Presley’s emphatically lowercase 1993 anthology, Poetic Off License.

It’s not quite got the full effect written down – to experience the full force of his distinctive delivery, have a listen here:

Hovis was a much loved stand-up comedian and poet from Bolton, and this poem contains many features of his distinctive style: a love of wordplay, a particularly deadpan way of reading his poetry, and a sense of humour that paid particular attention to the mundane details of everyday life.

He had a fascinating life and was a much loved figure around Bolton and Manchester, but sadly passed away in 2005. At the moment, not much in the way of documentation about him and his life is around, not withstanding this great documentary Mark Radcliffe made in 2008.

So with the aim of addressing this, we want to research his life and work, with the eventual goal of putting it all together as a documentary. We’ll also be posting updates on this blog as we go.

We’d like to ask anybody with any memories of Hovis they’d like to share to please get in touch. We’d also like to invite anyone who knows his poetry to help us do a bit of commentary on them–lots of his poems contain references to specific places and aspects of culture (particularly Northern English and Boltonian culture). We want to make sure we aren’t missing anything–we’re going to be putting some of the poems over at https://genius.com/artists/Hovis-presley, and if there’s anything about a specific poem you want to say or think we should know, please give us a hand there too.

That’s all for now–we’ll be adding more to this blog as we find it.

You can sign up to get more updates by putting your name and email address in here:

ta very much