Tom Raworth

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Biographical note:  Tom Raworth was born and grew up in London. During the 1970s he travelled and worked in the USA and Mexico, returning to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College, Cambridge, in which city he still lives. Since 1966 he has published more than forty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose and translations, in several countries. His graphic work has been shown in France, Italy, and the USA, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians (Steve Lacy, Joëlle Léandre, Steve Nelson-Raney, Esther Roth, Nino Locatelli), painters (Giovanni D'Agostino, Micaëla Henich), and other poets (Franco Beltrametti, Corrado Costa, Dario Villa).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715084
ISBN:  9781844715084
Author:  Tom Raworth
Title:  Earn Your Milk
Series:  Salt Modern Lives
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CVL
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  05-Jun-09
Extent:  184pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  276 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Earn Your Milk contains all the uncollected prose works of Tom Raworth, gathering together Letters from Yaddo, The Vein and Letter to Martin Stannard with his uncategorizable prose-work A Serial Biography, an extraordinary assembly memoir and reportage. This invaluable collection now makes widely available work which was previously hard to obtain or long out of print, it will delight fans as well as general readers wanting to discover more about one of the UK’s most widely-celebrated poets.

Tom Raworth was born in London just before the Second World War and has done everything wrong since. For half-a-century he has printed, published, translated and written poetry; has occasionally taught in several countries; and has read his own work and performed with other artists all over the world. He has a taste for spicy food from his father’s service in Burma and a quick temper from his Irish mother. He is at the moment of no fixed abode. In 2007, in Modena, he was awarded the Antonio Delfini Prize for “lifetime career achievement” though as he remarks “he is not yet dead.”

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
A Serial Biography
Letters from Yaddo
The Vein
A Letter to Martin Stannard

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from The Vein

Sitting at a light wooden desk, facing a pale cream plaster wall. To my left, one of the two long windows of the room. Old uneven glass. Dark green outside shutters closed. A small black lamp jutting out of the wall to the side of the desk shines down onto a radio (France Marseille playing something Brazilian) and reflects onto this paper from the two grey steel sheets that cover the bottom halves of the shutters. Beyond the lamp is my bed, double, with a striped red and green cover. Along the wall beside the bed runs a slatted wooden shelf with on it a glass vase next to a painted wooden tomato. The room is L-shaped. Vinyl floor-covering in herringbone light oak. Behind me in the corner (I’m sitting on a straight wooden reed-seated chair) is an armchair covered in mostly grey. In the narrow part of the L, away from the windows are two chairs similar to mine and a wooden table with a white tiled top. Past them is a small bathroom, and a kitchen with sink and refrigerator — no stove yet.
When the shutters are open I look across the street to a patchy yellow wall with two windows edged in white, very small and not level. Leaning out of one usually covered by a small bamboo screen is a young Arab girl, smooth olive face, gold earrings, neck chain caught between her teeth, staring down at a yapping poodle. A pair of bright red shoes lies on the sill. The other window is never open, but frames a cactus in an earthenware bowl.

Sunlight flashed across the seats as the plane banked. Snow-covered mountains to the left. Bus into the city (36f). Early autumn temperature. Down the wide stone steps of the station, right turn into La Canabiere, sea in the distance. Reflections from a gilded statue high to my left. Water choppy. Heavy traffic. Cross to the edge of the dock then walk around the port. Back across the road by the Mairie. Right into Rue du Refuge. Up the narrow flight of brown hexagonal-tiled stairs.

what happens in any

sovereign body is created

on the evidence of the last

head on its last lap

those of us watching

then, during the programme

see the die seem to be cast

to draw the teeth

of our first question

affecting essential interests

they and only they had

she was dealing with

an unworthy family

gathered for death

inconvenient location

gruesome tired mannerisms

a bit thick coming from her

losing the thread of argument

in a sinuous cartwheel

drained of what life

hurried out with a pushchair

unsparing he takes us

to the cabaret

into patterns and groups

contrived for distraction

more likely

to deepen withdrawal

such a decrease

in which women

had views diametrically opposed

soon changes his tune

howling

face to face

cruel for people

recoiling in horror

plastered indeed

by any form of social

charges and interest

it may be healthy

to change the tone