Sea Planes and Seed Trays

Sea Planes and Seed Trays – Poems and Songs is a 2019 collection of twenty-two poems and five songs in turn humorous, serious, political and nonsense. Some focus on family relationships and others on current news stories.

Reviews

• • Andy Croft – The Morning Star, June 2021
    Sea Planes and Seed Trays is a collection of songs and poems by Simon Haines, mostly written in response to news events. There is a lovely song about the Burston school strike and some well-aimed attacks on the current government and its wealthy friends:
    They brought me up to be non-violent cos violence is a sin / But so many of your policies / make me want to kick your head in.
  • Terence Blacker, author, journalist and songwriter
    The cover illustration of this poetry collection has a gruesome look. It is of a grotesque, yellow-toothed masked figure which would not be out of place at voodoo party on the streets of New Orleans. Don’t be fooled. The poems and songs in this book are approachable and funny, capturing the joys and pains of everyday life with real warmth and poignancy. When there is justified anger and frustration at the world outside, it is of the ironic, low-key kind – and all the more effective for that.
  • Anne Sherer Broom
    With the sub-title Poems and Songs 2016-2020 this witty and playful collection belies an often-serious – although thankfully not excessively “woke” – voice running through some of 2021’s hottest, topical issues.
    It is unquestionably a voice broadly of the Left but leavened with humour and without the crushing seriousness of so much other “political” verse.Even his Green credentials are laced with humour as in Climate Emergency where he tells us he only uses his diesel car (of course!) for journeys of more than a mile.   Others are quietly considered but often devastating, including Quarter-to and Excess Office Equipment.
    Simon’s idiomatic flair with words means this collection cries out for public performance where the words can be liberated from the paper to the stage.Some examples from the collection:

    GALLERY SOUVENIRS
    We have a Grayson Perry hanky you wouldn’t wipe your nose on
    A detail from a tapestry – in yellow, green and crimson
    And a David Hockney cushion that you wouldn’t sit your arse on
    Twenty-seven quid it cost – “A Bigger Splash” in cotton

    And a Giacometti T-shirt with a sculpture that’s been sprayed on
    A tall and spindly man – looks more like I’ve spilt food on.
    A fridge magnet by Matisse – a cut-out “Blue Nude Two”
    A sixteenth of the actual size makes it easier to view.
    

    

    And a Wassily Kandinsky tea mug – “Swinging 1925”
    Finest white bone china keeping “modern” art alive.
    We’ve got nothing by Picasso yet, that’s something I’d quite like
    Pants with Three Musicians or Don Quixote on a bike.

     

Simon Haines says

I’ve always written songs and poems though very few have seen the light of day until now. Lockdown gave me more time to write and more subjects to write about.  Several of my poems have been included on the Poetry Wivenhoe website. Two of these were included in their printed collection Tales Told By Birds. Other poems of mine have been broadcast on BBC Radio Essex.
But the story actually goes further back than this. When I was about 7, I went in for a national poetry competition for primary school children and amazingly won second prize. We had to write an extra verse to Old Mother Hubbard. I was too scared to go to London to collect the award, but I was pretty chuffed, even though the prize was only a book token. Sadly I didn’t keep that extra verse.
I think it was probably at this point that I decided I wanted to be a writer. My parents used to ask me regularly what I wanted to write. My answer was always “I don’t know yet.” But, ever since then, I’ve always been busy writing something: songs, poems, magazine articles, children’s stories and for the last 40 years EFL textbooks.