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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.
This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the author's
Selected Writings series, guides readers through the many-faceted
poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten
has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty
years - not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving
force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival - and his
poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With
thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book
is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers
and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries
and frontiers. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's
oeuvre responds enables him to put down 'multiple roots' in a
number of literary traditions, and this is reflected in the book's
diversity. It sets out not only to be of use to readers and
scholars already acquainted with Berengarten's poetry, but as a
guide to those who are encountering his work for the first time.It
is divided into three main sections, the first of which approaches
the work thematically and the second chronologically, while the
third focuses on his 'Balkan trilogy' (The Blue Butterfly, In A
Time Of Drought and Under Balkan Light). The book also contains an
appendix of essays on Berengarten's ancillary roles as literary
activist, EFL teacher/entrepreneur and teacher of poetry to
children, as well as a detailed bibliography.
Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or
Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy . . .
although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too
typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of
Plymouth. Those familiar with Werner Herzog's masterwork The Enigma
of Kaspar Hauser will, however, pick up the reference to Kaspar's
dream-and, accordingly, much of this retrospective selection of
prose-poems deals in the 'remote viewing' that Herzog's flickering
rendition of that dream celebrates. For here are places both far
and near, unknown and known . . . from the Sahara Desert to the
Tamar Valley, from the doomed flatlands of Bla Tarr's Hungarian
puszta to the equally-doomed shores of WG Sebald and Brian Eno's
Dunwich.
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