About the Author

David Troupes was born in 1979 and grew up in the town of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a leafy place with good woods and swamps for wandering. He studied English at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, and then Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, gaining along the way a wife and a satisfyingly varied job history. His comic art appears regularly in at least one Vermont newspaper, and has been featured in periodicals in Sweden, Portugal and the US - see www.buttercupfestival.com for more information. He currently lives in West Yorkshire, where he works in social housing. His first collection of poetry, 'Parsimony', was published by Two Ravens Press in 2009.

Reviews

'The Simple Men, David Troupes' second collection, is a real gem: a gritty, lyrical hymn to the conjunction of nature and humanity. He has the sharp eye of the artist and sees through to the essence of things in vivid, stunningly spare images. He brings us up so close to the world in all its hardness and beauty that we almost feel its breath. But there is no room for complacency or sentimentality in his work - this is real nature - nature described in all its wonderful complexity and stubbornness. As he puts it himself, this is 'no place for phony conjurings'. The 'Simple Men' sequence, which runs through the collection, leavens it with a celebratory, spiritual core that is starkly optimistic. Troupes has an engaging ability to find beauty equally portioned in backwoods or roadside diner. The carefulness and intelligence of his writing ensures this is a collection to treasure.' John Glenday