Welcome
Nigel Pantling lives in North London. His poetry has been published in a range of magazines including The Rialto, The North, Magma and Smiths Knoll.
A Foreign Country
To be published by Smith Doorstop in April 2025
Nigel’s fifth poetry collection A Foreign Country will be published by Smith Doorstop in April 2025. Here’s what the cover says:
In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.
It’s Not Personal
Published by Smith Doorstop in 2020
Nigel’s second full collection It’s Not Personal evokes a life, from childhood in the Fifties through the challenges and eccentircities of the workplace, to the unpredictability of family, love and death. These are poems concerned with truth; but just as importantly, with what it means to tell a story.
It’s Business
she said, from the chair
he still thought of as his.
New owners, new outlook:
we need to make changes,
show we’re serious, starting
at the top. Nothing personal.
Nothing personal, not to do
with your management style,
the quality of your team,
your rapport with suppliers,
or relationships with clients:
all good. No, it’s business.
Just business: we’re pleased
with margins and cash flow,
so we’ll pay half your bonus
and your long-term incentive.
It’s just that I’m taking over.
Like I said, it’s not personal.
To purchase a signed copy of It’s Not Personal, please go to PayPal and enter nigelpantlingpoetry@gmail.com to identify Nigel's e-mail account. The price is £9.95 plus £1.05 towards postage, a total of £11.00. Please remember to provide the delivery address and to mention for whom would like your copy signed. Alternatively, you can email Nigel using the form on the Contact page, or you can buy It’s Not Personal through the Smith Doorstop website. You can also find It’s Not Personal on Amazon.
Hip Hind Hook
Published by Smith Doorstop in 2018
Nigel’s second pamphlet Hip Hind Hook reflects his experience as an officer in the Royal Artillery in the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War and catches the strange unsettling tension of that time, and the idiosyncracies of regimental life at the eastern border of democracy.
“Nigel’s imaginative transformation of a British army officer’s experiences of Cold War deployment in Europe is immediately compelling. Focussing on a wide range of entirely convincing characters and situations, his entertaining short story poems have the accumulated power of a long and absorbing novel.” Michael Laskey
Bombardier B.
He could have been a magician in another life,
making things appear before your very eyes;
when the bar was down by six beer barrels
before a stock-take, he helped the NAAFI staff
lift the four remaining barrels on their lorry.
Later they swore on oath they'd loaded ten.
He can also make himself invisible:
he once played the enemy on a divisional exercise
and a patrol of Green Jackets, keyed for ambush,
stepped unknowing over his camouflaged body.
Sadly, he can make things disappear, too,
which gets in the way of further promotion.
To purchase a signed copy of Hip Hind Hook, please go to PayPal and enter nigelpantlingpoetry@gmail.com to identify Nigel's e-mail account. The price is £5.00 plus £1.00 towards postage, a total of £6.00. Please remember to provide the delivery address and to mention for whom would like your copy signed. Alternatively, you can email Nigel using the form on the Contact page, or you can buy Hip Hind Hook through the Smith Doorstop website. Amazon also sells Hip Hind Hook.
Kingdom Power Glory
Published by Smith Doorstop in 2016
Nigel Pantling was a soldier in Northern Ireland during the early years of ‘The Troubles’, private secretary to Ministers in the Home Office during the most turbulent year of the Thatcher Government, and a merchant banker in the 90s when privatisations and mergers and acquisitions were rampant. He now advises chief executives of companies on strategy. His writing in Kingdom Power Glory draws on the danger, the absurdity and the human frailty that he has seen at first hand.
‘Nigel Pantling’s poems lift the lid on worlds closed to most of us. In language that is straightforward and precise, subtly ironic, he lets facts tell their own, often shocking, story. We never feel preached at, but, rather, are invited to reflect on veiled aspects of the world that surrounds us. The overarching subject of the collection is language, and the uses to which language can be put. The poems are perfectly judged encapsulations of situations in which protagonists use carefully chosen words to normalise what are often grotesque situations. This is a memorable collection.’ Carole Satyamurti
Cutting Back
“I used to be in HR in the City”
she says, drinking the tea
I’ve brought out on a tray.
Above us, half skeleton,
the London plane tree
which fills my windows.
“But I wasn’t ruthless enough”
Into the wood-chipper go
armfuls of fresh branches,
leaves warm with sunlight.
We watch the whirring
spew of green and brown.
“I could see the human consequences.”
She puts down her mug,
straps on her helmet,
picks up the chainsaw,
and boots spiking the trunk
climbs to cut the other half.
To purchase a signed copy of Kingdom Power Glory, please go to PayPal and enter nigelpantlingpoetry@gmail.com to identify Nigel's e-mail account. The price is £9.95 plus £1.05 towards postage, a total of £11.00. Please remember to provide the delivery address and to mention for whom would like your copy signed. Alternatively, you can email Nigel using the form on the Contact page, or you can buy Kingdom Power Glory through the Smith Doorstop website. Amazon also sells Kingdom Power Glory.
Belfast Finds Log
Published by Shoestring Press in 2014
Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the Royal Artillery in the early Seventies. His experience on three Northern Ireland tours provide the backdrop for Belfast Finds Log.
Vehicle Patrol
It was an ordinary van, Belfast City Laundry
painted on its side, parked in a side street.
Ordinary, although now you mention it,
heavy on its springs, the door taped shut.
Anyway, there was room to pull in behind
for a smoke-break. They stopped there -
helmets off, rifles resting across their knees -
for ten minutes. Ten minutes, the time
it takes a soldier to crack a few jokes,
finish a cigarette. Also the time
to run a clock down to zero,
to trip a rocker switch, to fire a detonator.
To purchase a signed copy of Belfast Finds Log, please go to PayPal and enter nigelpantlingpoetry@gmail.com to identify Nigel's e-mail account. Some of the poems in Belfast Finds Log also appear in Kingdom Power Glory, so the price is reduced from £7.50 to £4.50 plus 50p towards postage and packing, a total of £5.00. Please remember to provide the delivery address and to mention for whom would like your copy signed. Alternatively, you can email Nigel using the form on the Contact page. You can also buy Belfast Finds Log on the Shoestring Press website, and of course through Amazon.