My Collected Poems 1975-2020 is due out from Shearsman Books – publication date April 2021, so the publisher tells me. Here's a link to its page on the Shearsman website . The details are slightly out of date – it will come out at 538 pages, rather than 520. A whopper, anyway. It's been proofread, and all is go. The cover image of the rings on a tree-trunk is from a photo by Elaine Edwards. More news soon! UPDATE: Out now....
Day 1 You wake in what seems to be an abandoned factory. The pipework and ductwork is of an extraordinary beauty. There is no way out. This is the Holding Pen, whence no-one in reality, despite the stated protocols and procedures and mission statements established by the Management, ever escapes. But hang on a minute. You must have escaped, it’s vivid in your memory; except it isn’t, that’s an illusion, because of course there is no longer any discernible electro-chemical activity in that skull of yours, because, frankly, you have the condition known as brain death. That is to say, your brain stem is no longer in meaningful connection with your spinal cord. That trumps everything. So to say “you wake” or that “you remember you awoke” is fanciful. But there you are. The good news is that this is no abandoned factory after all; actually, it looks uncommonly like your own bed in your own bedroom in your own flat. Congratulations. You made it. What do you think of that? Sorry, ...
[CONTAINS SPOILERS!] The novel that came to be called Secret Orbit had a long gestation which would be too tedious to detail. For years I’d had a perhaps not very original perhaps pretentious notion of writing my own Divine (secular) Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. All three parts were to be set in different versions of London. Secret Orbit was once the title of another associated project, but eventually came to be allocated (initially as a working title) to the part of the trilogy that represented Hell. Of course, Hell is always the most fun to write. The title stuck, and the novel got written. Like the other half-written novels in the sequence, it is structured in 33 chapters, mirroring the cantos of Dante’s original (there are actually coded references to the mirrored canto in each chapter, though I’ve forgotten what some of them are). The framing device is a description of the stages of decomposition of the unnamed protagonist’s body as he lies in his London...
Comments
Post a Comment