Tracks of My Tears

Tracks of My Tears

POETRY

Pages: 106 Ratings:

Book Format: Choose an option

Free standard delivery on UK orders over £35

*Your order will be dispatched after the publication date of 18-07-2025

Tracks of My Tears is a selection of poems by Paul Hollingworth.

Hollingworth utilises varied styles, including the Sestina form, to play with themes which touch our lives in one form or another. He sees every poem as a ghost story and a space to create thought on eternal issues such as loss, love, change, ecology, time, history, markets and identity. He takes us at different moments on a philosophical and poetic journey to the Peruvian and Colombian Andes, to London, to Venice, to Andalucia and to Dorset in order to discover magic, change, and dystopia. He writes about UK riots and Covid-19.

There are many ghosts here: teachers, friends, poets and philosophers. People who shaped who we once were and are today. Real, rather than fake, influencers. There are ghostly locations everywhere too.

The collection is a pondering for all of us to question what we hear or read and “certain or safe” beliefs about where we belong, to value what is sacred within human life, and to fight for truth and authenticity as well as acceptance of others rather than lose ourselves to unscientific easy opinions and conspiracy theories despite our natural susceptibilities, flaws and failings.

Born in Goldhawk Road in 1965, Paul Hollingworth started writing poetry and plays in his teenage years. At school, he founded a Poetry Society, the subject of “Dead Poets Society”. Paul went to Westminster School and to the University of Glasgow, the subject of “Steamboats” in the collection Exits and Entrances. He later gained a postgraduate qualification from St Mary’s University. He has lived and worked in Latin America, the subject of a few poems in Tracks of My Tears.

Paul believes that the creative process is not about communicating ‘grown-up meaning’, but is born from the unconscious into a playful guess at best, embracing uncertainty and paradox, and feeling our way as we go along from the playground, leaving interpretation to others and to the future. He explores joys and sorrows which are transfigured from experience and delves into the sublime hinterland of being, excavating an image from timeless depths, ashes, and ruins.

Paul has worked within the financial and education sectors and environmental finance.