Long term BGS English teacher David Briggs has released his fourth collection of poetry entitled 'The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems' with Salt Publishing. 

David has been an English teacher at BGS since 2005 and a huge asset to the School. David has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book — Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), a Poetry Wales pick of the year — took him on a reading tour ranging from a Festival of Death and Dying in Somerset to the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, from an American diner in Cheltenham to the Suffolk coast for Poetry in Aldeburgh. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A pamphlet, Habitat (Blueprint 2021), responds to the Covidian pandemic through the lens of W. H. Auden's 'Thanksgiving for a Habitat'. David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he also completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter. As a recording musician, David released an album of original songs in the early 2000s, and he still performs regularly as a singer-songwriter.   

David's fourth book, The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, is now available from Salt. Click here to purchase.

This new collection further demonstrates David Briggs's extraordinary flair with form, music, imagery and theme. These poems are deeply sensitised to the processes of ageing, to the challenges and tendernesses of parenthood, friendship, and love, and are wonderfully alive to the quirky details of culture from which they spring. Inventive, witty and playful, profoundly musical, and robustly and beautifully made, Briggs’s poems assert his voice as one of the most mature, intelligent, and vital in contemporary British poetry." — Andy Brown

The Odyssey Complex is a book which understands how now is haunted by then or, as the poet puts it, how ‘there’s just enough of the past swilling around in the present.’ A cactus on a windowsill witches us back through a life, a playful narrative involving Michael Douglas becomes a weighing of accomplishments, a display of shoes in a museum leads us to the loss of a father. Briggs is a poet I always look to for the real thing and, as he builds the body of work which only he can, this sparkling new collection gives us so much to admire, to be grateful for and to love." — Jonathan Edwards