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Tityrus (Paperback)
Duncan Wiese; Translated by Max Minden Ribeiro, Sam Riviere
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R308
R277
Discovery Miles 2 770
Save R31 (10%)
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Ships in 9 - 17 working days
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The ideals of simple country living have captivated poets for a
crow's age. But in the countryside that Tityrus knows, the beech
trees tower like skyscrapers, mice wrestle each other, and the
nearby island is infected by swarms of gulls. The forest is a
source of energy, but also the home of a behemoth transformer
substation and where a little boy has drowned. The shepherds are
prescribed Ritalin, slip in the mud, cry without knowing why, and
sustain themselves on mini pizza rolls. Wiese's poetry is as
hilarious as it is gentle, moving gracefully between the everyday
and the profound. Building with the narrative quality of a novel,
Tityrus is both an elegy to a natural world that has long been
overindustrialised, and a love letter to all that remains.
'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and
just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the
language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I
could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem 'Full of clever postmodern
flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's
funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian 'I
absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the
most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to
say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan
Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation 'I first heard about Solomon
Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...' Later that
evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our
unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese. In a
conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's
story of his spectacular fall from grace. A story about a scandal
that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial
plagiarism. A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and
a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry
cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the
death of an old poet. A story about a retreat to the East Anglian
countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital,
through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social
media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he
is obscurely implicated... A story that will take the entire night
- and the remainder of the novel - to tell. 'Reading Dead Souls
feels like discovering the British Bolano, and not just for the
gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching
sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I
haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke
Kennard, author of The Transition 'Elegant, ambitious, very serious
and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field
'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant
pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums
All three-dimensional objects can be experienced in two dimensions:
it just takes some careful unpicking of the seams. Witty, comic,
plaintive, touching, acerbic, droll, cavalier, caffeinated,
irreverent, stringent: Austerities, the mind-altering substantial
debut from Sam Riviere, seems to achieve the impossible in being
all things at once. Initially conceived as a response to the
'austerity measures' implemented by the coalition government in
2011, the poems quickly began taking on a life in kind: 'cutting'
themselves on levels of sentiment, structure and even subject
matter. Not content to merely build a series of freethinking poems,
these remarkable pieces seem eagerly and mischievously to analyze
their moment of creation, then weigh their worth, then consign
their excess to the recycling bin thereafter. Experience is speedy,
the poems seem to say, so dizzyingly fast that the poetry will
inevitably be running to catch up - often arriving at a scene the
moment after the moment has gone. The effect is as funny and it is
startling, beguiling as it is surprising, and makes Austerities a
vivid reminder that deprivation, as Leonard Cohen put it, can be
the mother of poetry.
Welcome to After Fame - an ambitious and resonant engagement with
the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, which completes the loose
trilogy of Sam Riviere's process-derived works. It was Martial who
first used the term 'plagiarism' in its modern sense as a kind of
literary theft. Here, the notion is tested even further through the
figure of a distracted scribe who, by means of various methods of
transcription, including the use of machine translation and
creative embellishment, presents a copy of Martial's famous Book I
unlike any other. These 118 poems cover timeless themes such as
work, friendship, public life and sexual mores, and, as they
unfold, are increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship,
technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role
of the poet: all fixations of Martial's work that still resonate
today. Not strict translation, bona fide reproduction nor wholly
original writing, After Fame challenges the integrity of such
categories. So liberated, it dramatises the obscurity of its
source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its
contemporary relevance.
Sam Riviere's debut, 81 Austerities, began as a blog responding to
the spending cuts, and went on in publication to win the 2012
Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A sequel of sorts, the 72
poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines
of public and private engagement. Kim Kardashian's 2011 marriage
lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of the
performative spectacle of celebrity life. Whatever the truth of
this (and Kardashian's own statements refute it), Riviere has used
the furore as a point of ignition, deploying terms from
Kardashian's make-up regimen to explore surfaces and
self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation. His approach
eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore
what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. For,
as with 81 Austerities, the process of enquiry involves the
composition method itself, this time in poems that have been
produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search
engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The
effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant
on biography until we are left with a pixellation of the first
person. Kim Kardashian's Marriage is a captivating examination of
artifice and reality, privacy and exposure, and an uncanny
commemoration of the contemporary moment.
'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian, and
just so explosively written that I had to stop and shake the
language-shrapnel from my hair and wipe it off my eyeglasses so I
could keep reading' Jonathan Lethem 'Full of clever postmodern
flourishes, self-referential winks and riotous set pieces. It's
funny, smart and beautifully written' Alex Preston, The Guardian 'I
absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the
most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable--which is to
say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan
Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation 'I first heard about Solomon
Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank...' Later that
evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our
unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese. In a
conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese's
story of his spectacular fall from grace. A story about a scandal
that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial
plagiarism. A story about childhood encounters with nothingness and
a friend's descent into psychosis; about conspiracies and poetry
cults; about a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost and the
death of an old poet. A story about a retreat to the East Anglian
countryside and plans for a triumphant return to the capital,
through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social
media accounts - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he
is obscurely implicated... A story that will take the entire night
- and the remainder of the novel - to tell. 'Reading Dead Souls
feels like discovering the British BolaƱo, and not just for the
gleeful dismantling of the cultural ego: the restless, searching
sensibility; the precise tuning-in to contradictory voices. I
haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke
Kennard, author of The Transition 'Elegant, ambitious, very serious
and very funny' Katharine Kilalea, author of OK, Mr. Field
'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged. A rare and brilliant
pleasure' Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums
Occasional Wild Parties brings together Sam Riviere, one of the
most discussed of the new generation of British poets, whose
'post-internet' poetry sees him acting now as scribe, now as DJ,
taking in everything from technologized romance to celebrity
culture as filtered through Kim Kardashian's make-up routine; the
'elegant ghoul' Frederick Seidel, zooming through the dark
underbelly of international high society on his Ducati racing bike;
and the wonderfully observant Kathryn Maris, whose work ranges with
a dark wit over incomprehensible deities, wayward mothers, the
politics of children's sports contests, and psychoanalysis. All
three lift the lid on their corners of civilized society to show
the less glittering realities that lie just beneath the surface.
"On the verge of perpetrating acts of artistic barbarism "I
perceived a spoon as the title of a plate of food" - SAM RIVIERE,
'Mindfulness' "Deer garter-belt across our vision And stand there
waiting for our decision. "Our only decision was how to cook the
venison. I am civilized but I see the silence And write the words
for the thought balloon." - FREDERICK SEIDEL, 'Kill Poem' "The man
in the basement wrote stories about heroin. The woman in the attic
read stories with heroines. The woman in the attic noticed a bruise
that ran from the top to the base of her thigh. The bruise looked
like Europe. The man in the basement was in love with the sister of
the secretive man who loved him more. He whooped to the woman, 'You
killed your student?' To himself he wept, 'I killed my father.'" -
KATHRYN MARIS, 'The House with Only an Attic and a Basement'
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