Biographical note: Michael Brennan was born in Sydney in 1973. His first collection, The Imageless World (Salt, 2003) was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry and won the Mary Gilmore Award. Brennan received the 2004 Marten Bequest for Poetry and is the Australian editor of www.poetryinternational.org. He currently lives in Nagoya, Japan where he is a lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies and Foreign Languages, Nagoya Shoka Daigaku.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844710058 ISBN-10: 184471005X ISBN-13: 9781844710058 Author: Michael Brennan Title: The Imageless World Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Jul-03 Extent: 108pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 162 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation: Through unaddressed and unsigned letters, this remarkable first collection evolves into a snapshot of contemporary experience – its anxieties, intimacies, absurdities and horror. Dipping between parody and mourning, Brennan interrogates the possibilities of friendship and community, casting a dark lucidity on strangely familiar territory.
Main description: Through momentary glimpses and unaddressed, unsigned missives, The Imageless World evolves into a snapshot of contemporary experience – its anxieties, intimacies, absurdities and occasional horror. Dipping between parody and mourning, Brennan’s first collection of poetry interrogates the possibilities of friendship and community, casting a dark lucidity on strangely familiar territory. Ranging over gene manipulation and child slavery, rhesus monkeys and monks, Toranas and karaoke, dismembering Greeks and Japanese tatooes, Mali and the shoes of the first world, hip-hop clips and Mallarmé, jilted lovers and Christ entombed, The Imageless World puzzles over the joys and deficiencies of language and human being before the deluge of the contemporary. At once celebratory and critical, defiant and open-hearted, Brennan’s poetry offers the black humour and intimacy of a polaroid mixed with the meditative and fragmentary logic of a dream.
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Table of contents: The Imageless World Letter home Letter home Postcard Ellipses The other Youth Letter home Letter home Postcard agitator les voyants consensuality translation apogee Letter home Letter home Excavation Series Outside faith Epileptic The present abyss Exothermic Salvage Tabula Letter home Letter home Locuting Love Pop Currency Letter home Letter home Letter home The Imageless World Letter home Letter home Dismembering Orpheus Letter home Postcard Afterthoughts Postcard Postcard eye tasting light
Tokens of change crowd you over, a deeper dark set in the dark, the blue, a gentian in foreign plots, a coin gutted and thread around the rear–view mirror, snapshots curved on the edge of a glass.
A conical shell in subsections, a watercolor, a study for this stairway into America. One day step outside, just start to walk, face pixilated, looped over bites of sound and copy. Take bread and regret. Gasoline
burns identify one refugee but kill the other. Morocco, intransigent New York, in the delta of coffee grounds, hashish tar, our very own avalanche. Remind me, oh Exotica—in Anéfis, Mali, Africa—of the shoes of the first world.
Driving to the coast, road–train rhetoric crying ‘O Pacific! O Pilgrims! O Hammer!’ O fuck it, I know what I want to know is a pop–song, all vinyl interiors and a libidinal ease. Just make the rent and spare a little change.
Review quote: The letters Brennan has posted throughout The Imageless World work to create traces of worlds that exist only as languaged moments, or momentary presences, including the most intimate. Brilliant, devilish, harrowing, profound, Brennan is writing for the twenty-first century.
J.S. Harry
Review quote: Michael Brennan writes a poetry attuned to the impossible, a poetry responsive to what in friendship and passion resist representation. If the world he evokes is imageless it is because, as Shelley said, the deep truth is imageless. Equally, Brennan’s world is imageless because it is wholly present: even absence is felt as a brooding presence in these extraordinary poems of lost love and mourning. A flux, a passage, a taking place: such is the presence of this stunning first collection.
Kevin Hart
Review quote: The poems in Michael Brennan’s first collection, The Imageless World, entice the reader with a slow-burn lucidity, skillfully peppered by a cheeky erudition.
Dorothy Porter
Review quote: Brennan is a master of the ellipse.… for its musicality, strangeness and power [The Imageless World] is an astonishingly beautiful work. In years to come, it will surely be seen as one of the most important débuts of this generation of poets.
David McCooey Australian Book Review
Review quote: If our generation needs a reminder of Orpheus Brennan is it.