£7.95
‘If it weren’t sacrilege, I’d call Brendan Cleary the fallen Messiah, a troublesome, tormented prophet showing us the way through the fragmented wilderness that is the modern city, staggering through the disintegrating concrete jungle with his kindred dispossessed. He’s the urban cowboy of broken hearts, and he shoots from the lip. His Irish Card was a tearful and brilliant testament of estrangement and exile. Sacrilege finds him in the last chance saloon of inner exile, firing off irreverent messages to anyone who’ll listen: obsessed and obsessive, bleak but almost blissful in a manic fashion, scathing yet giving himself the same lashing as anyone else within tongue-reach. The Cleary of Sacrilege is a word-brawler looking for one of Miss Magdalene’s lost girls to save him from the cross of his own fear. Sacrilege is the gospel of the city according to Cleary, the four books of Goin’ Down Slow, Radioland, Sad Movies and The New Rock ‘n’ Roll. If poetry is the new rock ‘n’ roll, then Cleary is the mouthy member of the band, giving it all he’s got on stage with Sacrilege before smashing up his heart in the hotel-room. He’s the one who’ll get us all bust.’ – Harry Novak
1 in stock
| Weight | 0.140 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 220 × 140 × 6 mm |
| ISBN | 978-9500725873 |
| Cover | Paperback |
| Publication Year | 1998 |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe |
Cornrows and Cornfields is a heartfelt journey from the childhood fields of Indiana to the glittering metropolis of Chicago. Spinning together memory, popular culture and personal politics, celeste doaks makes words dance, weep, wail and sing – often in the space of just a couple of lines. This sublime collection of delightfully bold and vivid poems burn upon the mind’s eye long after the final page is turned.
Shirley May’s She Wrote Her Own Eulogy takes the reader on a journey, the landscape of Kent and Manchester brought to vibrancy via Jamaica. It is a twisting road, the displaced lives making new communities on strange soil, the stories kept and told and shared. It is wisdom, it is memory, and it is future and hope.
The body is the ‘bad machine’ of George Szirtes’ latest book of poems. The sudden death of his elderly father and of his younger friend, the poet Michael Murphy, remind him how machines – sources of energy and delight in their prime – go so easily wrong; and that change in the body is a signal for moving on. But language too is a body. Here, politics, assimilation, desire, creatureliness and the pleasure and loss of the body, mingle in various attenuated forms such as lexicon, canzone, acrostics, mirror poems, postcards, and a series of ‘minimenta’ after Anselm Kiefer whose love of history as rubble and monument haunts this collection. George Szirtes is one of our most inventive – and constantly reinventing – poets, and Bad Machine shows him developing new themes and new ways of writing in poems which stretch the possibilities of form and question language and its mastery.
Courting Katie explores tenuous notions of what it means to be Irish. This is a collection about drunken nights, about cranes, outbound flights, and confirmation parties. Situated within a range of pre- and post-Celtic Tiger contexts, it examines social and cultural crises, both local and national. These poems engage with the experience of Ireland, not simply in a grandiose manner, but through the individual, and the many disappointments that have been suffered on this island.
CCTV cameras, TV recording equipment, microphones, all capturing and recording events in peoples lives. In today’s Big Brother world, these constant intrusions are at once a threat and a comfort – moments would be lost forever without surveillance. Tim cumming tells of events caught on camera as they happen to disparate protagonists, seemingly at random, but which dissolve into one another as they loose partners, jobs, identities and belief. “Contact Print” is set in a traffic jam on the Holloway Road in London. Its hero is Tony Harris, who is seen driving away for the last time from his married girlfriend’s house into a traffic snarl-up, a demo, a pub, a maze of memories, the city or the city itself, repeating itself to the horizon, which finally swallows him up. Along the way we are treated to arresting images of urban life, from the kidnapping of a junior minister to doing smack in the toilets of Paddington station. This is a world of personal and political instability, captured with photographic accuracy.
Tim Cumming’s poems have been published widely in Britain and America, and he writes regularly for The Guardian and The Independent. His work has been broadcast on BBC radio and TV, and he has featured in the New Voices season at the South Bank. He lives and works in London.
“This imagination creates a mystery you can’t paraphrase. Poems put things, or create things, in a place where they, and we, have never quite been before. A concise, mysterious language alters things. The result is a wonderful fidelity to the way things may be imagined, which also suggests it might just also be the way things are, once altered, re-imagined and imaginatively transformed.” John Brown Poet/writer, Northern Ireland
