 |
Biographical note: Anthony Caleshu is originally from Massachusetts. Since 1997 he has lived and worked in Ireland and now spends most of the year in Southwest England where he is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at University of Plymouth. His play In the Bedroom premiered in Galway last Spring, and his poems, stories, and criticism have appeared in a number of journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Poetry Review, American Literary Review, The Dublin Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. This is his first book of poems.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844710171
ISBN: 9781844710171
Author: Anthony Caleshu
Title: The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 15-Mar-04
Extent: 140pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight: 210 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 10.99
Price: USD 16.95
Rights: World
|
|  See larger image PAPERBACK / SOFTBACK 
20% off at the UK Bookstore!
£10.99
£8.79
20% off at the US Bookstore!
$16.95
$13.56
| |
Short
description/annotation: This is contemporary poetry that extends the tradition of writers such as John Ashbery and Paul Muldoon. Its importance is in its progressive use of language and its interesting look at contemporary culture.
Main description: This is Anthony Caleshu’s first book of poems. Divided into five sections, themes range from the erotic to the religious in poems which are as inventive for their images as they are for their form. Concerns with language and contemporary culture are at the forefront of these poems, which are alternatively whimsical and seriously subversive. Straddling both the anecdotal narrative and the experimental lyric, these poems are at their most progressive in two sections of ‘dialogues’ and ‘collaborations’. The dialogues make use of disembodied voices as each poem creates a definitive scene. The collaborations play on notions of otherness and integration as Caleshu collaborates with himself; bouncing language against langauge, like hitting a tennis ball against a garage door. This is a poetry that captures the fun of having serious implications. If American in language games and effects, it is international in subject and wit.
Table of contents:
Part I.
The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite (I)
1. The Siege of the Body
2. And a Brief Respite
Portrait
Peeping Tom’s Closing Argument on Why the Woman in the Third Floor Window Should Stop Dancing Naked around Her Room and Just Hold Her Hairbrush and Look at the Moon
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Ars Poetica Abandoned
Director’s Cut (1)
Soap Opera
1. Cassey to Samantha
2. David to Cassey
3. Samantha to Sue
4. John to Whit
5. Rob to Wilson
6. Sue to Rob
7. Whit to David
8. Helen to David
9. Wilson to Rob
10. Sue to Samantha
11. Epilogue : Samantha to Helen
The Interrupting
One Night Only : My Love Sings the Blues at the Chukker Club
Another Game of Chess
How Long Will this Game Last, or Should I Ask How Deep ?
Fixing Fences, Following the Hunt
Variations
Part II. Dialogues
Storming the Beaches
Ambushing the Houseatonic
The Wedding
Director’s Cut (2)
Drama : Galway
The Changing of the Light Bulb
Imagine a Caste System
Steve Was Caught Red-Handed Weighing and Selling Bananas by the Pound
The Headless Cyclist Wins the Tour de France
The Office Monologues
1. The Mannequin
2. The Transparent Raincoat
3. The Task
4. Lunch
5. In Case of Fire
6. The Lingering Hours of Early Afternoon
7. X, Y and Zed
8. Quitting Time
The Messenger
Invigilating Students
Homecoming
The Doctor’s Child and the Doctor
As We Approached the Summit
The Correspondence
X-Poem
The Yelping Hound Howling at Her Lord
Part III.
The Poet’s Introduction to Another Poet’s Reading
1. The ones who are better or different he has to hate because they are better or different —
2. And those who are worse he despises because that is his earned right —
3. Or, if they’re worse and successful, he hates them twice, twenty, fifty times as much for their success that indicts the taste of the public —
The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite (II)
1. The Siege of the Body
2. And a Brief Respite
At Thy Rebuke They Fled
Andy, My Friend the Businessman
August
Sestina : The Minister of Sound
Director’s Cut (3)
Faith
The Man with Wings
The Politic Heart
In Ireland, after the Legalization of Divorce
Part IV. Collaborations
Collaboration : Cleaning up the Park
Collaboration : The Art Thief
Collaboration : On Hearing She Taught Her Younger Brother to Kiss
Collaboration : A Day at the Beach
Collaboration : Why the Birds Came
Collaboration : Director’s Cut (4)
Collaboration : Film Noir
Collaboration : Between Countries
Collaboration : The Election
Collaboration : In a Time of Terror
Collaboration : The Satisfactioners
Collaboration : The Woman Who Can’t Dance and the Man Who Thinks He Can
1. Smoke rose from the dance floor
2. Outside the door, he waits for her to collect their coats
3. On their walk home, he uses the woman who can’t dance like a crutch
4. Stopping their goodnight kiss, she gets angry
Collaboration : The Wall
Collaboration : Pastoral on Fire
Collaboration : Migration Patterns
Part V.
Ciara Can’t Dance
After the Word Love Was Spoken
Epithalymion
Love, I Have Slept in that House
Study : Sunday Morning after Their First Saturday Night
Role Playing with Ciara
Your Mama’s Boy and Her Daddy’s Girl
Epithalymion
Love Thy Faye
Director’s Cut (5)
The Madam in Her Chateau and the Cuckold Who Camps in Her Front Garden
Church Full of Objections
The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (104 KB)
Excerpt from book:
August
After six weeks’ sun drink and sex
August has to come like this:
car crash, concussion,
Lucky, looks to be alive.
Only so much Summer will go unchecked.
But the Winter is so long, and we are
owed so much. The bars finally full
with others who will drink with us
and talk to us and know us
not as ourselves.
Only so much Summer will go unchecked
before the beaches try their tides
under our feet or the roads
turn one of us to leaf
fallen from the tree we drove into.
Not as ourselves
we will sit on the barstools of Winter
remembering August, rehearsing for June.
We ask this season to not pass us over.
We promise behaviour. We sulk like saints.
for D.C.
Unpublished endorsement: Anthony Caleshu is one of the best young poets writing in English. His poetry is remarkable for its velocity and quirky buoyancy, and, at the same time, its seriousness about cultural obsessions. We follow his poems’ logic and might at least temporarily believe we know where we’re headed, but inevitably Caleshu defeats our expectations, and we don’t in the least feel cheated by the experience. To borrow one of Caleshu’s tropes, our ways of making sense walk naked in these greatly satisfying poems. Lee Upton Review quote: Title aside, Siege is less concerned with the life of the body than of the mind. Sex and the siren-call of pleasure are explored in a subset of poems (including the deft “Pornography: Director’s Cut” which alternates in tone between clinical and ecstatic), but the real energy lies in Caleshu’s riffs. When Caleshu takes a snippet of source material and lets the mind fly, his results are always arresting, occasionally spectacular. Ellen Wehle
Agni Review quote: "You do not start out as an art thief. You turn to art/ because it is worth more than banks…" Anthony Caleshu's thematically surprising, daring debut is full of this kind of cool-headed reasoning, warped practicality and consummate creepiness…. Unsentimental, pervasively witty and ostensibly anti-poetic, the voices that populate this collection stand on the shoulders of recognisably American giants… Intelligent, imaginative, and mercilessly witty, The Siege of the Body and a Brief Respite is a rewarding and extraordinary debut. Aingeal Clare
Poetry Ireland Review Review quote: It is a book with an overall design into which stand-alone poems have been fitted. It is both an unconventional book with alternating sections "The Siege of the Body", "A Brief Respite", and a conventional one of poems written as necessity and inspiration demanded. Caleshu wants it both ways, which is a risk worth taking. William Corbett
Poetry Review Review quote: Caleshu contributes a drastically detached voice at odds with the formal conservatism of much Irish verse, past and present. His place in the anthology floats the notion that real aesthetic change is, if not imported, then washed ashore.' The Times |
|
Contact
us
