IE03. SCALE HEAVENLY // Hamish Rush

Established primarily for poetry and monographs, Infernal Editions are a series of high-quality, limited edition pamphlets inspired by the seditious temper of Parisian independent presses. Each edition will be DL size, hand numbered and bound with a riso-printed dust jacket.
 
 
Synopsis:

Scale Heavenly is a verse drama for theatre, the debut publication from Hamish Rush — born after a six year gestation with Pariah Press. An amalgamation of automatic, Imagist free verse and the sleep talk/song of a variety of haunting, re-emerging characters—the blurred and half-heard dialogue of a temporary, ghostly, often muted populace.
 
A spiraling, distorted loose diary. Rush weaves the faint dream of a Salford childhood into an ever-changing landscape.
 
Hamish Rush is an actor and writer from Monton, Salford. A full scholarship to the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama saw him graduate and move on to notable projects including: This Must Be The Place, Lies We Tell, and Mike Leigh’s Peterloo. He also regularly appears in audio drama for BBC Radio.
 
 
Praise for Scale Heavenly:
 
Hamish Rush writes like he’s shooting fireworks at the moon. Scale Heavenly is full of cosmic life and ecastic heart. He has a performer’s feel for writing and a writer’s feel for performance, which results in a fractured, energetic and fevered text that refuses to settle down. His dramatic verse takes language to breaking point and then pulls us back. It feels both precisely measured and loose with spirit. I’ve read it over and over and keep finding new things. What a gem.
     Brad Birch – playwright and screenwriter

Hamish Rush uses impeccably honed language and blazing, startling imagery to push back the boundaries of originality in expression. From an enigmatic table of characters, through surprising twists of direction—you don’t know where he’s taking you to until you get there—the buzz of intrigue you feel at the beginning carries you on a tidal wave of tiny, but exquisitely drawn, bursts of detail—with flashes of bright colour and rushes of movement through to a breath-taking end. Scale Heavenly is a new kind of language of beat and rhythm, rise and fall, volume and silence, distance and proximity, past and present, lost and found. An ode to memories, sweet and bitter but rapturous and indelible. You won’t be able to resist reading it aloud. If ever there was a time for innovation in epic story-telling, especially when told in dramatic poetry form, it’s now.
     Marilyn Le Conte – television & radio actor, editor of Radioactive Monologues

Rush is, at core, an image-maker. Contradictory but palpable and vivid images. I still don’t understand how they become so palpable. Apricot glycerine footballers and yellow pods shot from plastic barrels. These are new feelings for me. Their palpableness, I guess, is testament to a new plasticity of imagination. Scale Heavenly is one of those downhill worlds you fall through rather than explore. Some would call it picaresque and some would call it warmly piss-coloured. Its goblins smile sincerely, and gummily.
     John Johns – author of In perfect blue night a white owl flies
 
The poems in Scale Heavenly soar like hymns from a midnight choir if the choir were made up from a yard full of industrial skips. We can hear the tune but the voices belong to the rubble and the rain.
     Nick Power – musician & author of Holy Nowhere and Into the Void

There is an attractive crookedness to Rush’s writing which reminds me of Mervyn Peake. But this is more Mervyn Peake with an all-day bus pass, an eloquent drifter, talking loudly, scorching everybody in his sight, on his way to somewhere or nowhere. It works like an allegory for our newly bonkers and centreless world.
     Austin Collings – author of The Myth of Brilliant Summers
                                        and co-author of Renegade: The Lives & Tales of
                                        Mark E. Smith
 
Laden with imagery with emotional underpinnings, Rush’s word choices are visceral and intentional. Yet, ambiguous enough to impart one’s own meaning into the strange and enticing world he presents. The characters arrive fully and stay with you long after the experience. Scale Heavenly weaves motifs of stitches, rotting animals and spiders, surreally mixing the natural with the industrial. Flickers of childhood holidays bring lightness to the play juxtaposed with a dark and mysterious event, “it’s all in the achillies”. Scale Heavenly is a gift to the actor, director, audience, and “you” the reader. With the lyrical delivery of Dylan Thomas and the grittiness of Chuck Palahniuk; Rush utilizes a poetic other worldliness, that is emblematic of his unique style.
     Dr. Gemini Anderson – Cardiff University: School of Journalism,
                                                                                                        Media & Culture
 
I’ve been aware of Rush’s poetry for some time. The words seem to collide together and take the reader on a helter-skelter journey of the emotions, one minute bleak post-industrial angst, the next line a comedic collection of words reminiscent of The Goon Show or maybe Monty Python. His starting point is always very Salfordian. Sitting somewhere between Cooper Clarke and Mark E. Smith. I particularly find his live poetry performance fascinating.
     John Carroll - Artist