You Worry Too Much

ISBN: 9781915434173

Format: Pamphlet, 32 pages,

Available (Published: June 2024)

£7.00

Book details

Collecting poems with a sense of anxiety or an underlying itch – sometimes with a drop of wry humour – You Worry Too Much is the debut pamphlet of Nottingham-born poet Nathan Fidler. There are poems for people long gone, for people still here, and for tiny insects. There are poems about the strangeness of being alive, here with you. Often written last thing at night in the moments before nodding off, or after the buzz of a coffee in the morning, they acknowledge that we get these feelings sometimes, of doubt, of worry. Don't you? There aren't really any answers here, this isn't a self-help pamphlet. You'll just have to sit with that vague feeling for a while.

About the Author

Nathan Fidler’s keen interest in science fiction first turned him to words, something he's managed to use in his career as a copywriter in Nottingham. While studying for his Creative Writing degree he became hooked on writing poetry, but shortly after graduating he managed to quit. Then he fell off the wagon again. His work has been published in several magazines, including Rialto and The North.

1 review for You Worry Too Much

  1. 5 out of 5

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    The cover on this debut pamphlet shows an unnamed astronaut stranded in the ocean. Never was an image so appropriately matched with content. From ‘the gravity of orbits unseen’ to the humble fly, this collection takes us from universal perspectives to the minutiae of the everyday.
    The 28 poems in this collection address relationships, love, death and life with an adroit hand, guiding us through pain and potential with a dark humoured hand that is hard to resist. The overriding power of this work comes from the unswerving of the second pronoun of the title. ‘You’ is at once internal and external, challenging the reader and suggesting a personal life that we never completely see. In ‘Scanning Obituaries’, ‘a man appears with the light from his phone / rummaging through the skip of your life.’
    Coupled with this technique are vivid characters that we’ve all met and worry about. There is ‘The Barmaid’, where ‘we could own this world / of worn, patterned carpets, / carved up, sticky table tops, / sharing a bag of ready salted’ and ‘Grief’s Idiot’ who ‘misses his first bride, that bitch with the kind eyes’.
    Fidler’s insects deserve mention. Whether flies evoke for you Lear, Golding or Blake, they are beautifully used to focus our gaze upon the world. A special mention to the bees with their ‘bobble bodies’, so alive even if you have ‘inadvertently taken their queen’.
    In these poems we are ‘In Between Worlds’. We try not to worry but somehow You Worry too Much. There is nothing to worry about here, here, with Nathan Fidler, you are in very safe poetic hands.

    Dr Jane Bluett

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