Douglas Oliver

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Douglas Oliver was born in 1937, of Scottish parents, and grew up in Bournemouth. He worked for many years as a journalist, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 70s. He subsequently lived in Brightlingsea, Paris, New York, and again Paris, usually working as a lecturer. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including In the Cave of Suicession, The Diagram Poems, The Harmless Building, The Infant and the Pearl, Poetry and Narrative in Performance, Penniless Politics, Three Variations on the Theme of Harm, and A Salvo for Africa. He died in Paris in 2000.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710195
ISBN-10:  184471019X
ISBN-13:  9781844710195
Author:  Douglas Oliver
Title:  Arrondissements
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Sep-03
Extent:  172pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  258 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 17.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  “A poet of modern Paris has to write about more than the river mists …,” Douglas Oliver states in his preface. “More than mid-way through my life I have begun writing Arrondissements, a series of books or long sequences in poetry and prose, designed to reflect the world at large through the prism of Paris.”

Oliver, a British poet known for his international conscience as well as for his mastery of language and technique, assembled the present volume containing three works from Arrondissements – corresponding to three districts of Paris – shortly before his fatal illness. The editing of the volume has been finalized by his wife, the American poet Alice Notley.

The intial sequence, The Shattered Crystal, well-known in poetry circles since the mid-90’s, deals with Oliver’s own arrondissement, the 10th. It takes up the poetic heritages of Paul Celan, whose widow, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, had lived nearby, and Heinrich Heine, who also had once resided in the neighborhood. What is the weight of Celan’s burden/beauty in this old Jewish crystal quarter? What was the value of Heine’s different, assimilated Jewishness, as he endured his painful spinal malady? Oliver asks these questions aided oracularly by the paintings of Joan Mitchell, their colors and mysterious shapes.

In the short second sequence, China Blue, Oliver presents a set of “Chinese” poems, based on the explosion of Assian immigration in the 13th arrondissement. Questions of family, commercialism, the Cambodian genocide are raised in these highly accessible poems.

The final work in the book, The Video House of Fame, is a tour-de-force, a long poem in the form of a video game called REGENDER, played by a narrator very like the author, in a video parlor in the 2nd arrondissement. The narrator grapples with his own past and present, with postmodern philosophy, with global capitalism, with gender roles, and finally fails to win at REGENDER.

Oliver’s poetry is humorous, beautiful, often naked. It is served by both light-of-day reasonableness and a willful subconscious which knows the dark but can’t stop playing with language. The return of his voice in Arrondissements will be a pleasure for both old and new readers.

Table of contents:
Editor’s Note
Preface
Well of Sorrows in Purple Tinctures
The Shattered Crystal
A Little Night
The Weekend Curfew
Evening Descending Mauve: Gisèle Celan-Lestrange
Crystal Eagle 1
Crystal Eagle 2
Trink
Not Ready for River
Light in Back
Ready for River
Between Celan and Heine
Schreddinger and the Beard of Truth
Chord
Walnut and Lily
From rue d’Enfer to rue Bleue Again
Twilight Flowers
The Peculiar River
China Blue
Chinese Bridport
Money in Sunshine
Calling Them Home
Transcending the Hypermarket
Fidelity
East-West Apartments
Puppets in the Buttes Chaumont
Chateau Noir
The Video House of Fame
The Video House of Fame
ur
jahweh
rattanapur
thanaton

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (68 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

The Weekend Curfew

After the weekend curfew Celan
found the house
shuttered
the parents in captivity
himself condemned
to being enemy of himself.
His Todesfuge
began. Later that lyric
was, for many years,
an urn carried in German
ceremonies of forgetfulness
disguised as memory.
And so
Celan smashed it
with his intellect’s hammer.

For Nazi cruelty in its purist light
had filled that lyric,
a vessel of the Sephiroth,
and when the hammer broke it
musical fragments
became shards,
part of the song went hiding
silent in stones,
dark rising past the
secretly–glowing
stones on ashheaps,
words that
each whip
stroke cracked open
in savage light.

And we, we’d emulate this,
letting our lyrics croak
the throat
into broken music
as if mere self–unease
were our righteousness
smashing the lyric vessel
in darkness
so to be as smart as he was
oh to be as smart as he was
our words nowhere near bursting
with such a lesser weight of light,
as we flip through
the fragments
of our cheque book stubs.

Review quote:  In this posthumous volume, edited by his widow Alice Notley, Douglas takes fresh inspiration from the fantastical labyrinth of the French capital. The result is a teeming and panoramic book that rises at its best to the genuinely visionary.

David Wheatley
The Times Literary Supplement