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The Best British Poetry 2014 (Paperback)
Mark Ford; Series edited by Roddy Lumsden; Contributions by Rachael Allen, Robert Anthony, Simon Armitage, …
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R298
R221
Discovery Miles 2 210
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'The Best British Poetry 2014' presents the finest and most
engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the
past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of
current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet
explaining the inspiration for the poem.
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Ephemeron (Paperback)
Fiona Benson
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R350
R282
Discovery Miles 2 820
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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** The poems in Ephemeron
deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief,
urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt,
anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school,
as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day
shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter
Mother'. The long central section, 'Translations from the
Pasiphae', gathers these themes together in a blistering,
unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen
from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed
and violated Pasiphae. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero
slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a
story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of
violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphae
calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed
him in the dark, for years.' Telling uncomfortable truths, going
deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and
vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways
- these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute
and brave.
**WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2019** **WINNER
OF THE ROEHAMPTON PRIZE FOR BEST POETRY COLLECTION 2019** Violence
hangs over this book like an electric storm. Beginning with a poem
about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches
quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus
as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised.
These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and
rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and
historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing
contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women
continue to be perpetrated on a daily - hourly - basis. The book
shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of
depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and
ambivalent terrain of early motherhood - its anxieties and
claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love -
reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to
raise children in peace and safety. Vertigo & Ghost is an
important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk,
and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with
clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE** **SHORTLISTED
FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 'Misogynistic violence, ancient
myth and modern rage confront each other in moving and dynamic
verse' Financial Times
Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Winner of the 2015
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection
Shortlisted for the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlisted for the 2014
Forward Prize for Best First Collection In this remarkable,
intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her
fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological
fast-forward from submerged Devonian forests and a Paleolithic
cave-bear skull to the site of decommissioned submarines at HMNB
Devonport, where the sea is 'still a torpedo-path, / an Armageddon
road'. She explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing -
from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a
modern-day couple wading through summer pollen - and the timeless
cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing. A central sequence
of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focussed
exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity. In
these poems, as in all the poems in this impressive debut, we feel
keenly the sense of life lived at the edge of threat - catastrophe,
even - but also on the cusp of beauty and happiness. Other poems
about the bewildering loss of miscarriage are hard to read and
impossible to forget, moving with grace and authority through great
grief to arrive at a hard-won destination of selfless, unqualified
love. 'I remember again / the corridor / of the labour ward // and
that woman / sitting weeping / with her man // having given birth /
to a death - / small grey face, // no breath, / something you
cannot help / but love - // habibi, akushla, /I go home alone / but
carry you, // courie you, / little slipped thing, / to the ends of
the earth.'
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