Collected Poems upcoming in 2021

As the annus horribilis 2020 draws to a close, there is one ray of light at least for me – I just received by email a draft of the cover and first page proofs of my promised Collected Poems from Shearsman Books. A 520pp+ monster! It spans my poetry from around 1975 onwards. 

I'm very happy that the cover will feature a photograph by Elaine.

So I'm proofreading right now, and there will be more news soon.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Secret Orbit came to be written

Image
  [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...
Read more

Poundland

Image
  When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972. In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale...
Read more

GRECH Chapter 1

Image
  Something happened. There, where it happened before. What was it, when, where? In media res . In the wind. There as it blows. The wind makes our head cold and confuses us. There is almost constant wind here, where we sit or stand or lie, and it is chiefly blowing from the direction of the south-west, that is the prevailing direction, though sometimes (as a change) easterly, and one has to endure it, or make provision against it, or go with it, as is appropriate at any particular instant; for sometimes it’s mild, it softens the cheeks, glorious to relate, and sometimes it’s horrid, but that’s how it goes. It goes and it happens. That is, it sings. It sings as it sounds. A high-pitched sound in our ears, or that may merely be the tinnitus. And we sit or stand or lie in our quarters, which are partially sheltered, it has to be said, which will do. We are in media res , which is Latin for in the middle of it all, or in the middle of nowhere. We are discovered here, or we are...
Read more