David Chaloner, creative director at Conran Design Group

David Chaloner has been writing poetry since the Sixties. ‘The work I create with words, the possibilities that language presents as a means of communication both directly and indirectly, has for me many parallels in the other creative disciplines. Writing is intrinsic to what I am,’ says Chaloner. ‘The work of setting down words, manipulating the language, submitting to journals and magazines, creating collections, working and reworking the texts, is done at night, or occasionally at weekends, and even early in the morning,’ he says. He describes the influences in his work as ‘grounded in the present, to the future, acknowledging the past’.

Extract from Art For Others, section 5 by David Chaloner published by Equipage/Cambridge

Demands action. Breath a faint continuation

of the date. Stop.

Charmed, outstretched, dazzled,

That familiar face beyond the energy field

has lived before. Trapped by previous example.

Fill in the forms fill in the forms.

No title, no name. Obliterate difference.

Living here with loose objects.

A room constructed and demolished against a wall

of standing darkness.

Sense creates its own surface into which

you are granted access.

Pass to the embrace of a misguided future.

Realm of an uninhabited land.

Christened a name without substance,

faint growth in contours behind the eyes.

Sometimes to ponder nearby,

and sometimes to contemplate connections.

Seemingly exclusive, repeating, a command

ignored, associated with a real name.

Were there.