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This Is How You Disappear is Jeremy Reed's most autobiographical
book to date, and one in which he celebrates the dead and missing
friends who were the formative and enduring influences on his life
as a poet. Using the elegy to imaginatively recreate the often
extraordinary individual characteristics of his subjects, Reed's
personal book of the dead is one that burns with his customary
dynamic for dazzling imagery, glows with compassion for the
suffering, and sparkles with a visual retrieval of detail so acute
it hurts. With the title taken from the first line of a Scott
Walker song, 'Rawhide', This Is How You Disappear is elegiac poetry
at its most brilliant.
In "Voodoo Excess," Jeremy Reed charts in poetry and prose the
astonishing career of the Rolling Stones from the band s early days
in 1962 to the 50th anniversary tour in 2012 and its extension in
2013. With great originality he examines why the Stones have been a
musical and cultural phenomenon, and everything public and
mythical, anecdotal and apocryphal about the larger-than-life
individual band members, shaping the raw material into memorable
lyric poetry. This new volume is introduced by Mick Taylor, the
musician who left the band only to rejoin it, to great acclaim, for
their recent anniversary tour."
Sooner or Later Frank finds Jeremy Reed optimising his London
quarter of Soho and the West End, its outlaws, opportune strangers
and rogue mavericks condensed into poems coloured by an imagery
that pushes pioneering edges towards final frontiers. Right on the
big city moment, and with an eye for arresting acute visual detail,
Reed makes the capital into personal affairs. His characteristic
love of glamour, rock music, seasonal step-changes, and a
Ballardian preoccupation with the visionary render this new PBS
Recommendation, in John Ashbery's words on Reed's recent work, 'a
dazzling tour de force.'
Jeremy Reed's new collection centres on the legendary figure of the
jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-59), 'Lady Day', whose talent
propelled her from poverty in Baltimore to fame as a vocalist in
Harlem nightclubs and international celebrity through her
recordings with Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. But her life was
scarred by personal tragedy and by the drug addiction that led to
her premature death. From this dramatic material Reed creates a
highly charged series of poems and prose pieces, some spoken by
Billie herself, some by the poet as narrator, which brilliantly
illuminate the singer's world and the heady atmosphere of the jazz
age.
Jeremy Reed is one of Britain's most outstanding and famously
controversial poets, his originality of imagery and cutting edge
subject matter distinguishing him from most of his contemporaries.
His recent books include the poetry collections Piccadilly Bongo,
Sooner Or Later Frank, Voodoo Excess and Red Light Blues, as well
as a biography of Lou Reed Waiting For The Man and The Dilly: A
Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys. He wrote the libretto for
Marc Almond's 2015 album Against Nature, and performs regularly in
London and Europe, both solo, and as one half of The Ginger Light,
a unique duo combining performed spoken word with electronics.
Hamza Bogary describes a bygone way of life that has now
irreversibly disappeared. He speaks of life in Mecca before the
advent of oil. Only partly autobiographical, the memoir is
nevertheless rich in remembered detail based on Bogary's early
observations of life in Mecca. He has transformed his knowledge
into art through his sense of humor, empathy, and remarkable
understanding of human nature. This work not only entertains; it
also informs its readers about the Arabia of the first half of the
twentieth century in a graphic and fascinating way. The narrator,
young Muhaisin, deals with various aspects of Arabian culture,
including education, pilgrimages, styles of clothing, slavery,
public executions, the status of women, and religion. Muhaisin is
frank in his language and vivid in his humor. The reader quickly
comes to love the charming and mischievous boy in this universal
tale.
In Waiting For The Man, Jeremy Reed focuses on Lou Reed as rock's
principal literary avatar, paying special attention to his
controversial lyrics and prototypical garage sound. Lou Reed
influenced generations of copyists that took note of his outlaw
status, ambiguous sexual orientation characterised by his seventies
relationship with the transvestite Rachel, his implacable mystique,
cool and defiant attitude as the narrator of subcultures. Finally
the book examines the transcendent, if reluctant calm, that Reed
arrived at in later life. Taking in the sweep of Reed's career from
Velvet Underground to the variants of forty years of resistant solo
pioneering, Waiting For The Man accesses the man and his music,
with the extraordinary perception and attention to detail.
Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American
Studies at Essex University, wasn't easy as an anomalous poet
living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape
came by way of finding part--time employment with John Berger, part
of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first
modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive
aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his
mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my
unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle
forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property
of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the
house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of
mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through
which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the
period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly
coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton's LSD documentation of
her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry.
When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in
Chester Gate, Regent's Park a big light went out in me, and my poem
`Elegy for Paula Stratton' can be found in the collection This Is
how You Disappear, my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I
know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)
Isthmus was Jeremy Reed’s first collection, produced in a
finely-printed edition by Asa Benveniste’s Trigram Press in 1980.
Overwrought, perhaps even over-written, it shows the author
struggling with a gamut of new influences — some of them provided
by Benveniste – and trying to find his way in a brane new world
of poetry. The book has an American theme, and shows much American
influence, albeit undigested in places, but Reed’s individuality
brings it all together.
Asa Benveniste (1925-1990) who founded the legendary Trigram Press
in London in 1965, ostensibly to publish Anglo-American
cutting-edge poetry, was not only a self-taught, one-off maverick
genius as a printer, typographer and book-designer, but also a
superbly innovative language poet, whose own poetry tended to be
obscured by his merits as a publisher. Throughout its duration,
1965-1978, the Trigram list epitomised ultimate hipster cool, as a
leading independent. Jeremy Reed's deeply personal tribute to
Benveniste as his enduring poetic avatar, and the encourager and
publisher of his early poetry informs a book that is both an
appraising memoir and a significant evaluation of Trigram Press.
The book also includes a reprint of Benveniste's collection, Edge
(1975).
The first book of Jeremy Reed's uncompromising, explicitly
autobiographical expose of his life as a leading London poet from
the 1980s to the present day, a major long poem written in the
shop, while managing Red Snapper Books in the period 2007-2008,
takes in an acutely personalised retrieval of the Piccadilly Circus
ethos in the eighties, including meetings with the artist Francis
Bacon, bohemian Soho, an index of personal obsessions including
rock music and fashion, a defiant colour block of personal friends,
patrons, pick-ups and demi-monde outlaws, all generously
characterised for their individual importance and contribution to
the poet's life, and a direct full-on involvement with unstoppable
big-city momentum in the capital, intensely lived on a day to day
basis. The book is a highly courageous and cutting edge poet's
autobiography, explicit and detailed in a way few poets would dare
celebrate quite literally the uncensored resources of a highly
individual and sustained personal creativity.
Companion volume to Jeremy Reed's 2009 collection, Bona Drag.
"Bona Drag", a rich, brilliantly inventive collection of poems
covering every detail of the poet's obsessive life, from the colour
of Posh Spice's heels, to London street encounters, underworld
friends, urban survival tactics, neuroscientific concepts and
extraterrestrials, more than confirms J.G. Ballard's assessment of
Reed, as 'the most gifted poet working today, an extraordinary
talent'.
Sex, jazz, glam icons, green crochet bikinis, Gossard wonderbras,
white nights and blueblack seas - the usual colourful, sensual
Jeremy Reed imagery in this brand new collection. Jeremy Reed's
many poetry books include Saints and Psychotics (1979), By the
Fisheries (1984), Nero (1985), Selected Poems (1987), Dicing for
Pearls (1990), Nineties (1990) and Kicks (1995). Reed's books on
poets include studies of Rimbaud (Delirium: An Interpretation of
Rimbaud), Rilke, Hopkins, Madness: The Price of Poetry and Angels,
Divas and Blacklisted Heroes (1999). Reed has translated Novalis's
Hymns of the Night and Montale. His novels include The Lipstick
Boys (1984), Blue Rock (1987), Isidore (about Lautreamont), When
the Whip Comes Down (on the Marquis de Sade), and Chasing Black
Rainbows (1994, a fictionalized account of Antonin Artaud). His
biographies include Lou Reed, Brian Jones: The Last Decadent
(1999), Scott Walker: Another Tear Falls (2001) and Marc Almond
(1999). Other books include: St. Billie (2001), Sister Midnight
(1997), Heartbreak Hotel (2002), The Purple Room (2000), Dorian
(1997), Inhabiting Shadows (1990), Diamond Nebula (1994), Black
Sugar (1992), Escaped Image (1988) and Red Hot Lipstick (1996), The
Pleasure Chateau Omnibus (2000), Pop Stars (1994), Trucks in
Camera: Bedford (1996). Reed has won an Eric Gregory Award, the
Somerset Maugham Award, and the National Poetry Competition.
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