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Michael Brennan
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Michael Brennan

The Imageless World

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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

 

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spacer 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.

 

Meet the author

 

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

 

View excerpt as PDF:

PDF Click here to view a sample (56 KB)

 

Excerpt from book:  

Pop Currency

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.

Michael Farrell
Antipodes

 

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