Simon Barraclough, Luke Kennard & Chris McCabe

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718139
ISBN:  9781844718139
Author:  Simon Barraclough
Title:  Salt Modern Poets: Barraclough, Kennard, McCabe
Series:  Anthologies and Gift Books
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  29-Jun-10
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.99
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The first volume in the “Salt Modern Poets” series, offering selections from the work of Simon Barraclough, Luke Kennard and Chris McCabe. This anthology provides an invaluable introduction to the poets’ work and provides a stepping stone to further reading.

Main description:  The first volume in the “Salt Modern Poets” series. This volume collects together three outstanding new talents who have recently emerged on the contemporary British poetry scene. Simon Barraclough, Luke Kennard and Chris McCabe have all been published since the start of the millennium and each represents a very different poetics, from witty and urbane lyrics, absurd and surreal dialogues and political and social satire. The selection provides an invaluable introduction to the poets’ work and provides a stepping stone to further reading.

Table of contents:
SIMON BARRACLOUGH
Los Alamos Mon Amour
Saturn on Seventh
The Open Road
Contacts
Pike
Frigidaire
Giallo
Abductees
Goodbye Radio City
London Whale
Brighton Restored
Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine
Soloist
Desert Orchid
Fitting
Outlook Good
LUKE KENNARD
To a Wolf
Plethoric Air
The Murderer
A Pergola of Exceptional Beauty
Gerald Variations
The Dusty Era
The Last Days of Advertising
CHRIS McCABE
Three London Poems
Poems for Lunch
Michelangelo Manufactured by the Murdoch Empire
The Mananger
Abu Ghraib
The Pete Doherty in Prison Poem
Letter to Apollinaire Written in Père-Lachaise Cemetery
The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express

Excerpt from book:  

Pike
by Simon Barraclough

Teriyaki tigering the golden
deep-fried flesh and a flask of hot sake
fuming like a factory chimney.

This china smoke stack takes me back
to failing mills and Warcar Reservoir:
the stagnant pond that used to juice them

before profit migrated East to the land
of synthetics, cheap worsted, cheaper labour.
The summer of Jaws and tucked-up legs,

invented verrucas, sliding Sunday nights
down the gullet of the weekend bath:
feeling like Quint kicking at teeth, puking blood.

Pike were our local great whites but we had
no pike nets, pike repellent, strychnine jabs,
no Police Chief or ichthyologist.

We had hunks of drystone wall, giant bobbins,
window gaffs, rafts of unhinged doors,
to protect us from the monstrous fish

that Ted Hughes himself might have reared
and delivered overnight on the back
of a flat-bed lorry.

We knew the tale of the kid who dived
onto a rusting Cortina,
swam to the cobbles and bound up

his intestines in a pinkening towel
and almost made it home. But we knew
the pike had done it, though we watched

the council land the dribbling chassis
with a crane. We dared ourselves
back into the green water,

rafting down the overflow when it rained,
stooping under child-sized Niagaras,
leaping from the millstone-gritty walls.

I never saw a pike in the res
or in a keepnet and now I have one
in a dish, spit-roasted on a skewer,

I’m sorry for its cooked-blind eyes,
seared-off fins, flaking muscle.
I take it apart with chopsticks.



Plethoric Air
by Luke Kennard

We all laughed at the decomposing clown,
But later shame sunk upon us
And we got smashed on the balcony.

I had lost my left shoe in the blood.
The doyen and her ten attaches
Scattered blossom on the divans.

We were charmed by a famous puppy,
A dozen gold pins in her forehead;
A tendency to speak ill of the dead.

‘The dead are so stupid,’ she said.
An attache took me by the temples and ordered,
‘Look: that advertisement on the crevasse;

Notice the inverted commas around “crazy adventures”
Grow bigger than the words themselves,
Framing the very hills and the valleys.

Like that man by the fountain who changed his name to #:
But ask him why and he’ll say,
“You’ve got to stand out from the crowd, right?”

And other redundant platitudes.
Disappointment kicks you like an ostrich:
Bloody, sandy and hard.

In other news, we grow weary and suspicious —
And we’ll ask you to defend yourself
Using words we already hold to be meaningless.’


I lay back, bumping my head on the war.
Every solid object has been declared part of the war.
I saw the puppy flex her golden needles.

“You should talk to this guy,” I said, “he’s funny.”
“Talk to him?” she spat.
“I wouldn’t even eat his brain.”



The Pete Doherty in Prison Poem
by Chris McCabe

Eyes panda-blacked from a ten year boozecruise.
Shelled & contused—which is done-in to you.

One clean day back when, took a picnic to a park in a place
called Tuebrook & etched immortal Doherty into the bark.

No protests to your latest arrest, caught in the chunk-
cheeked duck walk from Dalston to Shoreditch.

New media of mad nerd dementia. They need you
less than this post-vampyric need not to need them.

On the inside it’s all stewing beef & pig kidney,
diced ox-heart with milk instead of cereal.

To miss the oaty warmth of Mother Time.
The dinner warden said he’s got some reduced fish

for lunch, you said that must be tadpole soup
and not one stern face in the queue laughed or lapped it up.

You could blag your blogspot & still no one would care
who you were, bar the one you said you love who stares

from their brick walls on a catwalk to catcalls & dogsnarls.
This diary you’ve done no less urgent than Gramsci’s

if more flippant—as you would say—mostly pants from flap-to-flap.
You can flick back to what you’ve done then wrap it up.

Head shilly-shallies like a shambolic bambino. Tomorrow,
back to some onion argie-bargie along Brick Lane

then gigs in Glasgow. Total stretch: thirteen days.