Costa Book of the Year Nominee: My Family and Other Superheroes by Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards introduces his poetry collection, My Family and Other Superheroes, nominated for this year’s Costa Book of the Year.

When Gregory Peck stepped out of a Rolls Royce in the tiny Welsh mining village of Crumlin in 1965, the first thing he saw was a young man with dark curly hair, leaning ostentatiously against the clapped-out 1930s Lanchester he’d bought the previous week for a fiver. The second thing he saw was his co-star in the movie Arabesque, which they’d come to the village to film – the drop-dead gorgeous Sophia Loren. She stepped from her Rolls Royce to a clack of heels which seemed to shake the whole village. It was at that point when the young man, shaking slightly himself, stepped forward with a copy of the South Wales Argus and a pen, and asked two of the most famous people on the planet to sign their names. That copy of the South Wales Argus now sits in pride of place in my parents’ living room. The young man in question was my father.

An open-top bus carrying an FA Cup-winning football team gets lost and ends up in a tiny Welsh village

So runs the narrative of ‘Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Crumlin for the Filming of Arabesque, June 1965,’ a key poem from My Family and Other Superheroes. The relationship between that story and the truth is one thing that poem explores, and in reality the poem isn’t about Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren at all – that’s just an elaborate way of getting to my parents, and the relationship between them. This approach – of focusing on outlandish events in order to illuminate something real – is something that is central to a number of the poems in the book. In one poem, I set up a situation in which the 1970s stunt motorcycle rider Evel Knievel jumps over, for once, not a row of double-decker buses, but rather members of my family. Another poem imagines that an open-top bus carrying an FA Cup-winning football team gets lost and ends up in a tiny Welsh village. It’s truths about family and place that I’m ultimately interested in getting to. If I get there via Ian Rush, or Marty McFly, or a bookcase thrown suddenly through a valleys village window – well, so much the better.

But if I’m engaged in my writing by the outlandish, I also wanted My Family and Other Superheroes to reflect an everyday ‘normal’ existence in Wales. I was keen that the book would celebrate characters in my village, Crosskeys, and the local city of Newport. The poem ‘Colliery Row’ is my version of the great John Cooper Clarke poem ‘Beasley Street,’ about a working class street in Manchester – I simply looked out of the window of my house and wrote down what I saw. The poem ‘Starbucks Name Tag Says Rhian’ is a love song to the girl who works in the café where I write a lot of poems. ‘The Bloke Selling Talk Talk in the Arcade’ is about a man I walk past every day in the Kingsway Arcade in Newport, his patter, his life. Crosskeys and Newport are brimming with superheroes, as, I very much hope, is this collection.

Jonathan Edwards for Waterstones.com/blog

You can Click & Collect My Family and Other Superheroes from your local Waterstones bookshop or buy it online at Waterstones.com