Nick Totton

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Biographical note:  Nick Totton was born in 1949. He works as a psychotherapist and trainer, and has published and edited several books including Psychotherapy and Politics, Body Psychotherapy: An Introduction, and Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal; he is editor of the journal Psychotherapy and Politics International. He has published several volumes of poetry, and was included in the anthology A Various Art. He has a teenage daughter, and lives in Calderdale with his partner.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710393
ISBN-10:  1844710394
ISBN-13:  9781844710393
Author:  Nick Totton
Title:  Press When Illuminated
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:  228pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  13 mm
Weight:  342 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 19.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This volume assembles work long unavailable in print, which forms part of a literary movement – the so-called ‘Cambridge Poets’ -of great interest to many scholars and writers. Nick Totton was involved as a writer, editor, and organiser of readings and events. His poetry has been variously described as ‘surrealist’, ‘postmodern’, ‘non-representational’ and ‘difficult’; it traverses political, sexual, metaphysical and psychological terrains, collaging multiple styles and vocabularies, and mounting repeated challenges to the first person, both singular and plural. Peter Ackroyd has written that Nick’s work ‘redefines the possibilities of political or “public” poetry at a time when it has fallen into disrepute’; Time Out described A Talisman, included here, as ‘remarkably interesting’. The work’s allegiance is certainly not to the current UK poetic orthodoxy, but more to North and South American and European figures like Spicer, Vallejo, Breton, as well as British poets like J.H. Prynne, John James and Denise Riley. Among the writings collected here are the previous, more or less unobtainable collections Making A Meal Of It and Radio Times, plus poems from the wholly unobtainable Scarcity and Mastering the Art of English Cooking; together with long poems including Seeing It Through, You Can’t Get There From Here, and Green Heart.

Table of contents:
FROM THIS MOMENT A CHANGE (1968)
UNCOLLECTED (1968-73)
Christmas Card
The Empty Hole in the Eddy
Ode on the Necessity
Tarzan And The Lost City
The Thirty Nine Steps: A Novel
The Nude Attracted By Water
Local Elections
MAKING A MEAL OF IT (1976)
Vidrios Han Caído
Arms Which Articulate Nothing
The Intensity-Brightness Distinction
Joking Apart
If I Had To Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You
A Word From Our Sponsors
The Contours Of Indifference
The Migrants
Mains Hum
Incandescence
Singing Practice
Java Is Wistful
Hermann, the Chinese Swinger, and Angst in the Night
Death Commando
Bread Lion
After Vallejo (I’ll Never Catch Him)
De Rien
Touch And Go
Take It, Maurice
A TALISMAN (1976)
The Primary Process
The Secondary Process
Asking Water From Your Wells
Corners of the Mouth
Biting Through
Cup Your Hands
Entr’acte
Inside the Meat Safe (Coolest Place in the House)
Whose Purpose is a Mystery to Us & Which Were Used by Later Races as Tombs
Perturbations
Astro-logy: Star Speech
Say It Another Way
Hypnagogy
Corpus Callosum
The Pleasure Grounds
A Mouse That Longed For Human Hair
A Talisman
SEEING IT THROUGH (1978)
FIVE POEMS FROM LOVE LAUGHS AT LOCKSMITHS (1979)
An Arrow Pointing to the Top Right Hand Corner
Out! Out! Out!
Just a Friendly Warning
Martin Webster Sucks, Paul Foot is a Fairy
RADIO TIMES (1983)
Food Trouble
Bones of the Face and Their Articulations
Permanent Work At Ground Level
McGoohan
ScarCity
There‘s Always A Little Bit Left in The Marmite Jar
Whatever Rhymes With Power
Three Dreams From The Sex War
Land For The People
Biologic Song
Thank You, Come Again
To Contrast Structures
No Sound. What Is Memory.
A Sleeper On The Twentieth Century
The Snow Queen
Not Slipping Into Something More Comfortable
This Song Is Dedicated To The One Eye Love
YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE (1984)
GREEN HEART (1992)
PRESS WHEN ILLUMINATED (2003)
Not A Theory of Poetry
The War Against Utopia
Empty Orchestra
Suitcase
One Swallow, No Summer
(Jazz) MF
Everything Must Go
Fully Into the Light
We Join the Game in its Closing Moments
American Mix
Press When Illuminated
House
Equinoctial
Buddha Poems
Shelters and Baskets
Hasta La Vista
Expert Systems
White Bits

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Excerpt from book:  

Death Commando

devil’s spoons across the cracked earth
seeking a fix between dusk and light —
         it remains only to collect the forces
         which don’t salivate on command.

in the damp fork of the tree is
a star which curdles milk at midnight
         like a little bird held in the palm
         that shoots up into a young man and leaves for home.

a reflex without springs or wheels
claw–like hands reaching out and out
         for the dark to end and wheels of light to roll
         across the ferocious littoral of silence.

what can you hear beyond the silence?
what can you see between the ball and lid?
         I suggest these notes and patterns
         are a measure of human worth.

seeking the grace of a solar gesture
you spin on the ball of the foot,
         avid with desire bite freshly into the skin
         as a splinter works its way inwards.

but only you demonstrate, descending
— tall as the sky, inserted into earth by the winds —
         your confusible traces, marital gesture,
         the red penis of the loved one.


arm perpendicular to mine
her code of justice is a white passport to the sunrise,
         mute and doting on the large details of death,
         the natural high of good and evil —

devil’s spoons across the cracked earth
tall as the sky, inserted into earth by the winds;
         a reflex without springs or wheels
         like a little bird held in the palm

in whom I am called the third eye.

Unpublished endorsement :  Nick Totton’s poetry, with its achingly, carefully measured sweeps of syntax, its knowledge of returns and its luminous urgency, was never seduced by optimistic opacity. Determined to come to terms with the truths of feeling, committed to a politics of the inner as of the outer person, it has steadfastly set its sights on the good that may come out of it. It can be funny, discursive, lyrical, angry, accepting, encouraging and knowing. I can’t imagine life without it.

Ian Patterson

Unpublished endorsement :  In the glut of babble and turbulent mendacity I read Nick Totton, such unassuming brilliance is scarcity indeed.

John James