Imperfect Pearls - Couverture souple

Matthews, Geoffrey Mark

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1874778817 ISBN 13 : 9781874778813

Editeur : Sunk Island Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

This collection of 70 poems by Geoffrey Mark Matthews was written between November 2014 and April 2019. The poems are arranged under six headings ‘Minutae’, ‘Orbis’, ‘Colludia’, ‘Poetics’, ‘Conscience’, and ‘Realism’ to reflect shifts in focus, technique, and mood. Gilbert Adair writes: “In one of the epigraphs to Imperfect Pearls, Geoffrey Matthews implies identification with Odysseus, ‘the man of twists and turns’; in another, Antonio and Sebastian riff on what they take to be Prospero’s giddy promises. Together, these mark out space for repeated & various testings of the license reality affords poetic imagination. We get sonic feasts governed by syllable-count (‘See how it is done’), acceptings of climate apocalypse (‘a humane vision / of an inhuman future’), takings of words & images for walks, visual patternings, phrasal permutations, delightfully inventive generic gambits (‘Exaggerated ecstasy’), deceptively incisive aesthetic & (in the final of six sections, ‘Realism’) metaphysical musings, wry but precisely trenchant placings of poetry amid the snarls of public discourse (‘Refuge’), a prophetic invocation of the Johnson baby blimp (‘Today’s beef’), occasional eruptions of the kind of disgust driving Williams’s Kora in Hell (‘Dark moment’), a scatological reworking of a line by Catherine Earnshaw (make what you will of ‘our souls’)—even a spirit animal (‘Why a white owl’), & much else. In all, a tremendous flexibility of linguistic address crafts firmly evanescent responses to a world that can only ever be incompletely known; Imperfect Pearls is/are playful & absolutely, soberly serious.” And Michael Blackburn writes: “Moments of abstract philosophical reflection suddenly crystallise into poetry. Idea manifests as image: ‘those who cannot see they/need imagination/and forget they need memory/are dogs/among dogs’. Or, as Werner Herzog said, ‘just cows in a field.’ In the flux of time (whatever time may be) and the commerce between perception and what we assume is an objective reality, something appears of apparent solidity and meaning. But briefly. The image as meaning. But then again, what is meaning in a universe where illusion is a necessary mode of survival? Metaphysics reduces to existential pragmatism, ‘all this talk/of new dimensions/is so much cock’ and we learn to live in ‘ever-bigger illusions.’ The way of endurance? To create and remember.”

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Sunk Island Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2019
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1874778817
• ISBN 13: 9781874778813
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 120
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg