Poppyland
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Salt Publishing
Published:2nd Jun '25
Should be back in stock very soon
On Stewkey Blues: ‘In his solid, grounded, entertaining collection of stories, DJ Taylor draws out the mythical qualities of East Anglia’s terrain, urban or rural or somewhere marginal in between.’ —Hilary Mantel
Most of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes – but only sometimes – taking a decisive step that will change their destinies.
There is an irresistible modesty to Taylor’s prose that makes his touches of humour leap out even more viscerally from the page. In “Special Needs”, he describes reality TV as a “spangled approximation” of life. I underlined bursts of brilliance like these throughout.
But something remains impenetrable about Poppyland; its figures remain attenuated, their motivations obscured. At the end of “Drowning in Hunny”, the narrator describes a look between two people as “not quite contemptuous, or kindly, but . . . something else altogether, that hung tantalisingly in the air between them, like the scent of the cooking oil”. It goes some way to capture what I felt as a reader. Leaving Poppyland, I was left with a curious aftertaste, of something rather sad and unknowable, but also moreish and nourishing — something remorselessly real.
-- Matthew Janney *ISBN: 9781784633462
Dimensions: 178mm x 111mm x 15mm
Weight: unknown
208 pages