The Ship - Couverture rigide

Williams, Mr John Hartley

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1844713393 ISBN 13 : 9781844713394

Editeur : Salt Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

John Hartley Williams may well contain several poets, all of them jostling for expression. These would include his younger self and many of his aliases, the lover, the satirist, the anarchist, the lyricist, the experimentalist, the saboteur etc. – all of whom are represented in this collection of largely unpublished work dating back as far as 1958, and ending in 1982. This marvellous book is organised not simply an `early selected’ poems, with everything arranged in chronological order, but as a coherent new collection epitomised by the title poem The Ship.

Poetry has a philosophical function: to place seriousness (often equated with reliability or consistency) in question, and thereby achieve the serious joke that conceals the fundamental unease without which things never will get better. This is not just irony, which is just a privileged form of time-wasting. The humour that the serious joke contains demonstrates how much of what we take seriously for granted is merely shadow-play (political speeches, the news channel, the oil crisis, supermarkets). The serious joke reveals the paucity of present day reality. It replaces the names of shadow-discourse with the names of things as they are: axes, bottles, carpets, dwarves, eggs, feet, geckoes, hats, igloos, jampots, kukudus, lampposts, mistresses, nappies, octopi, penguins, quicksands, rats, sausages, tubs, underwear, violins, whips, ex-wives, yams, and zoot-suits. If the names come at you systematised through the alphabet, so much the better; the alphabet is the most humorously devised system ever (it makes no sense). This book aims to give you things as they are, and to make sense through the fuzzy logic with which they are presented.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

John Hartley Williams grew up in London. He worked as a teacher in France, the former Jugoslavija, and West Africa, and has made his home in Berlin since 1976. Williams has published many collections of poetry. A retrospective volume, The Ship, was published by Salt in 2007. A novel, Death Comes For The Poets, co-written with Matthew Sweeney, will appear from the Muswell Press in 2012 as will a new collection of poems Assault On The Clouds from Shoestring.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Salt Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1844713393
• ISBN 13: 9781844713394
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible