Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  John Wilkinson was born in London in 1953 and grew up in Cornwall and Devon. After a career in mental health work in Birmingham, Swansea and East London, in 2005 he joined the Keough Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, as Poet in Residence, and teaches in the Department of English. With his wife, the literary critic Maud Ellmann, he lives between Mishawaka, IN and Cambridge, England.

Biographical note:  Drew Milne is the Judith E Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. His books include The Damage (Salt) and Go Figure. http://drewmilne.tripod.com

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710652
ISBN-10:  1844710653
ISBN-13:  9781844710652
Author:  John Wilkinson
Title:  Proud Flesh
Series:  Salt Modern Classics
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  104pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  156 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Wilkinson’s searing classic, Proud Flesh, is a blistering journal of love’s intensities and convulsions. Panning across its characters like a camera, this is lyric poetry as film noire, filled with jealousy, violence and sexual obsession. Incandescent images and language play across the bodies of the lovers, each caught, frame by frame, in an intense act of surveillance.

Meet the author:

Podcasts

Play “Armorial glass which sags …” (760 KB)


Play “Defenders run amok …” (1.1 MB)


Play “Doors open to the metal crash …” (920 KB)


Play “In this trial run for behaviour …” (892 KB)


Play “Moths feed at this window …” (556 KB)


Play “Unconscious grace that I caught …” (1.3 MB)

Table of contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Drew Milne
Proud Flesh
Notes
Index of First Lines

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (76 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

A fat photograph . . .

A fat photograph
about to be cropped

where what is incidental
bloats an incident

with light or dead space
The elements

will say Ah
drawn close

the moles & needles
drill unpractised flesh

She dies less
for points of their

invention, solid caps
over points of entry

than a quick–to–the–jaw
reasonableness

without waste or
overlapping

idly ripping
incidental blossom off

Unpublished endorsement :  Proud Flesh introduced us to the unexpected fluencies, the strange dramas and practicalities of John Wilkinson’s poetry. Reminding us that poetry also needs to be pitted against conventional forms of intelligibility – the finding of a ‘voice’, the satisfactions of narrative – Wilkinson was already writing a haunting, unheard of lyric poetry against the grain of the taught traditions. A startling and eerily accomplished book, Proud Flesh has become a great contemporary text.

Adam Phillips