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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. On the spirit of poetry in a time of plague by Richard Berengarten
2. More trouble with genre. Markku Nivalainen in conversation with Simon Collings
3. Plum Pudding books: Anthony Howell reviews Michael Hampton and Marius Kociejowski
4. Why I am not a philosopher, or The Annoyances of Philosophy, by Alan Wall.
5. ‘oracle’ and ‘Mary Does Laugh’. By Kate Ashton
6. Of Peace and Strife by W.D. Jackson, illustrated by Alan Dixon. A verse-column
7. J’accuse…injustement, Anthony Howell considers Stephen Glascoe’s account of being falsely accused
8. Passion, framed by silence. Michelene Wandor reviews James Runcie.
9. The Hills and the Desert: Claude Vigée and Edmond Jabès, by Anthony Rudolf.
10. ‘A Way to Dismantle’ and four more poems by Ion Corcos.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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Peter Dent’s ‘starmaps left for night’.
Oasis Books, 1999 | 20pp. | €5,04
Adversaria
Stride, 2004 | 48pp. | £2.35 $32.95
Handmade Equations
Shearsman, 2005. 95pp. £8.95 | $13.50
By HARRY GUEST.
Simple Geometry contains eleven prose-poems of an extraordinary beauty. A painter studying blue vessels on an old oak table says “You almost have to take your mind off it. . . to get it right” – a paradigm for Dent’s own method since he too looks sidelong at reality so as to get it into focus. In the poem called Transition, “The ‘place’ tonight’s a word that loses meaning even as it calls for it Becoming something other Like a long-lost song but darker”.
Handmade Equations (with a handsome design on its cover by the author) is divided into two sections – Horizons and Façades and Faith and Valediction. New Register, the first poem in the book, introduces the poet in autumn “anxious at the wheel of an empty sky”. There is an unexplained task, tricky because he finds “familiar easy roads now just / Impossible to read”. There is a hint of ”an interim account” and “an illusion trying / To see him off and minus belief”. But the poem concludes with cautious optimism referring back to the striking metaphor of the start: “he’s steering clear he’s ready to go.” This excellently achieved poem exemplifies what is individual and exciting in Dent’s writing – the genuinely romantic celebration of “the new blues”, “October reconstructed” and “woods high on the skyline” – the mosaic of disjointed or allusive word-groups – the sure control of memorable imagery: “quick immaculate machinery” or “starmaps left for night”.
The second section includes two meditations on the First World War as a woman recalls someone “making / for the front shells falling” and, as in “Close Disorder”, “last night’s kills come / Begging” as well as a personal memory of a Field Trip in 1955 riding “a one-gear bike tyres grumbling” and hearing “that farmgirl blue-eyed saying her be for is”.
I very much admire Peter Dent’s skill, his utter sincerity, his refusal to opt for the easy way out and the way he offers the reader so much in each poem that is intriguing, honest and richly wrought. The very titles like Dry Spell (In Italics) or Dreamed-of Extremes (questions on a day out) promise such pleasure and do not disappoint when we encounter “outlandish almost turquoise trees / In a certain kind of light”.
♦
Harry Guest’s latest publication (from Impress) is A Square in East Berlin, a translation of Torsten Schulz’s acclaimed novel Boxhagener Platz (which has been successfully filmed). He reviewed ‘Anthony Rudolf’s literary Wunderkammer’, silent conversations, for the Fortnightly here and Peter Dent’s latest work here. Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. He read Modern languages at Cambridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in France, Japan, and England. With his wife, Lynn Guest, the historical novelist, he now lives in Exeter. His collected poems, A Puzzling Harvest, was published by Anvil in 2002. A subsequent collection, Some Times, appeared in 2010. His poem, ‘Links from a forgotten chain’ is here and his tribute to Peter Redgrove is here.
A poem by Peter Dent, ‘In close formation’, appears here.
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Publication: Saturday, 21 June 2014, at 14:17.
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