The Rest of the World - Couverture souple

Jope, Norman

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1848617895 ISBN 13 : 9781848617896

Editeur : Shearsman Books, 2021

Synopsis

ʹGeo-delirumʹ - as the title of one of the pieces puts it - is perhaps the guiding theme of this collection. Following on from Dreams of the Caucasus, Jope's prose poems occupy an interconnected - and increasingly digitalised - world in which traditional notions of the ʹpoetry of placeʹ continue to be at stake. Evidence gained from virtual explorations - Google Street View in particular - informs much of the work, enabling the author to ʹtravelʹ to locations as diverse as Sicily (Corleone), Mississippi (Clarksdale) and Norway (Nordkapp) with no more than a series of mouse-clicks. By contrast, other pieces draw upon his first-hand experience of Hungary, Plymouth and elsewhere from his early years onwards as well as on his extensive reading and research. The world is envisaged as a treasure-trove of information that can be accessed, by all available means, in the pursuit of whatever knowledge a finite human life allows.

Writing of Jope's work, David Pollard (Tears in the Fence #68) suggests that he ʹis on a journey which has no ending, which searches for a topos never available except as poetry, as a book, perhaps an atlasʹ. Taken as a single enterprise, it poses the question of how much can be known of the world by anyone in the thirty thousand days or so which, at best, are likely to lie at their disposal - and the deeper, darker question of where all that knowledge goes when the individual who has acquired it loses their residence on earth.

ʹBefore I dieʹ, he writes in the title piece of the collection, ʹI will visit the rest of the worldʹ... as if saying that somehow made it possible, at least for the duration of its saying. But perhaps in a sense it does.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Dreams of the Caucasus is Norman Jope's sixth full-length collection and his second from Shearsman, after Dreams of the Caucasus (2010). Two collections have appeared from Waterloo Press, The Book of Bells and Candles (2009) and Aphinar (2012), and one from Stride, For the Wedding-Guest (1997); he has also co-edited the anthology In the Presence of Sharks: New Poetry from Plymouth (Phlebas, 2006) and a Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt, 2011 and Shearsman, 2016). Born in Plymouth, he works as an administrator at Plymouth Marjon University and has co-organised Plymouth Language Club's long-running live poetry reading series since 2012 (having been involved with it since its inception in 2000) along with fellow Shearsman author Steve Spence. He has also made frequent visits to Budapest where his partner, the artist Lynda Stevens, lives and works; his most recent full-length collection, Gólyák és rétesek (ʹStorks and Strudelsʹ), was published in Zoltán Tarscay's Hungarian translation by FISz-Apokrif in 2018.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Shearsman Books
• Date d'édition: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1848617895
• ISBN 13: 9781848617896
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 92
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne