This extremely handsome and well-produced book announces itself as ‘original poems by Sally Richards and Steve Mann, Shropshire Poets’ – but this is more than just a collection of poems.  The paradoxical title ‘Colourful and Dark’ is the first indicator of the kaleidoscopic world you are about to enter when you open the book.
It is divided into five sections, Life and Introspection, Fantasy and Spirit, Nature and the Universe, On the Lighter Side, and Dark Experience and Emotion.  One sees at once that all of human life is here, and indeed the scope of the book takes in everything from fatalistic depression to Gothic tales that revel in darkness, and from light-hearted rhymes and drawings of family pets to an existential denial of the value of thought.
A human life isn’t neatly divided into good days and bad days, few experiences act only on one area of our lives, and far too many books seek to impose an order that does not, in fact, exist.  When I first dipped into this book, I called it a chaotic, kitchen-table world.  The common thread that runs through it is Richards’ and Mann’s tender enjoyment of the Shropshire landscape and rural life which is the setting of their own lives.   Having gone deeper into the book, I stand by my first impression. ‘Waiting for Gulliver’ is a warm, inclusive, disarmingly frank human picture of rural England and all who sail (and sometimes sink) in her: domestic and familiar one minute, startling and vernacular the next.  If you want a pretty and comforting book about the countryside, give it a miss.  If you want a real and wonderful world with your actual human beings thrashing around in it, you will enjoy this book.

Sally Richards currently has a story and poem in Monomyth, Atlantean Publishing's fiction magazine 

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