In Memory of James D. Quinton

Last month writer, editor, friend and boss James D. Quinton sadly took his own life.
Whilst a fuller tribute will be published once it becomes possible to articulate the loss in a comprehensible way, here is a short elegy in memory of James.

A beautiful tribute by Adrian Manning is available here:
http://www.concretemeatpress.co.uk/james%20quinton%20memorial.htm

My thoughts are with his family.  He will be greatly missed - a gifted man and one always willing to believe in others before himself.

Street Psalms (in memory of James D. Quinton)

‘the edge is there

I know it’s there

because it calls my name

and some days

I feel like running towards it...’ (from Seduction)

These streets will always be yours.

Dressed in a double-layer of cloud

the pearls of your fingertips mime a cigarette.

A four-walled world made boundless

by your imagination.  You’d strike out

into that borderland nightly

to beat out your exile in every step and word,

and return with the morning tapping stories

from your boots, scattering night-songs like sawdust

across the floor, the ineffable etched

into your face – another chance to paint

light onto the skin of light.  And yes,

had you been a canvas lost in Paris

in the early nineteenth century, Picasso

may have painted his greatest work on you.

You who would always push for the edge

and thought something of my nothings.

You who will never stop reminding us

that a whisky-tongued stranger

lighting the borders with a cigarette

will always have stories to teach us. 

by Steve Nash