Biographical note: Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. He has worked in several jobs since graduating from university, mostly as a side issue to writing poetry. His work has been published in numerous journals, including Poetry Salzburg Review, Angel Exhaust and Great Works. He has also read at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry 2004 and in the Crossing the Line Series at the Poetry Café. He currently works as Assistant Librarian at the Poetry Library, London. This is his first book.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844710744 ISBN: 1844710742 Author: Chris McCabe Title: The Hutton
Inquiry Series: Salt Modern
Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt
Publishing Pub date: 01-Sep-05 Extent: 176pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 10 mm Weight: 264 gms Supplier:Gardners
Books Supplier:Ingram
Book Group Supplier:Inbooks
(James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 10.99 Price: USD 16.95 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation: Chris McCabe’s
remarkable debut collection is divided into five sections, ranging
in subject from the Second War in Iraq, to the chaotic pleasures
of London life and love. Political, experimental and ambitious,
this book pushes the boundaries of British poetry, but with infectious
wit and plenty of style McCabe delivers the goods. Funny, serious,
urban and savvy — this collection is unforgettable and heralds
the arrival of a major new talent.
Main description: The
political events of Summer 2003 is the setting for the main sequence
of poems in “The Hutton Inquiry (A Taste of Verdigris).” The
poems move quickly, as scraps of information, piecing together
the picture of a summer gone wrong. The emphasis is on speed, association,
guesswork creating a mosaic from the fragmentation of political
divide and rule.
The story of the nascent war in Iraq unfolds in “Progress
Poems,” a sequence that began as an indictment of false notions
of progress, and turned into a melting-pot for harboured cynicisms:
from Rupert Murdoch to Tony Blair. Jumbled in numbers from 1-2000,
the poems move with the synchronicity and randomness of the internet.
The book opens with “A Taste of Verdigris”, a series
of mostly present-tense, lived-in poems. These poems differ from
so much contemporary poetry in that they account for the fabric
of daily existence before it reaches the point of retelling through
the techniques of story. They press with the immediacy of the moment.
“The Smog: London Poems” is a sequence for anyone who
has ever experienced the sensation of the outsider, newly arrived
in London. “The London Migration Sequence” accounts
for the London rookie’s attempts to make ends meet, and to
begin to make sense of the metropolis. The final poems in the book
are a series of love poems, lighter in touch, including a nod to
the French Surrealists. These poems are the secure place from which
the books broader experiments can take flight.
Table of contents:
a taste of verdigris
a taste of verdigris
milton keynes
modern realist keep-fit poem
twilight fishing
fancy an indian
poems for lunch
michelangelo manufactured by the murdoch empire
pere lachaise cemetery
interpreting flying dreams
a piglet imperialism
cititrix
two for the zoo
flossing for fishhooks
sky tree wank star
post-its
network
running poet’s heart thinks in free verse when it rains
case study
garbagesleep
the other tonight
babalaas
dylan’s bust
the garden party
dance of the victorian remote control
progress poems
# 1,502: letter to rupert murdoch regarding his smile
# 601: punk
# 1,991: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in
# 11: wittgenstein
# 1,336: 1938
# 227: lunch-break powernap:
# 902: graduating
# 1,927: annual conference:
# 1,394: the allies
# 743: thatcher & the brighton bomb
# 1,492: tHE sTAND-dOWN cOMEDIAN:
# 185: search engines
# 838: the class divide
# 764: painting the sky:
#1,291: beyond iraq
# 800: ivor cutler
# 1,772: a drunk man compares teenage pregnancies to a horse chestnut
# 192: suburbs train
# 659: cleaning habits:
# 255: darwin
# 666: surprise visitations
# 592: theatre of war
# 1,906: bonnie & clyde
#374: revisonist theories
# 433: the jogger
# 171: mobile phone games in first class
# 1,333: defining genre:
# 555: george w. bush
# 302: indexing blighty
# 87: bakhtin’s smoking habits
# 21: the martyrs
# 1,803: the lads
# 457: a perfect imagist poem
# 409: on the night bus:
# 702: the union
# 959: television networks
#1,857: media coverage
# 1,687: backseat activism
# 328: management styles:
# 1,531: internet death of chris mccabe
#278: genetically modified
# 819: barflies
# 526: some propaganda
# 972: pre-reading reception:
# 189: vincent van gogh
# 1,111: ezra pound
# 911: self-referential poetics
# 1,174: industrial reminder
# 850: red label classification in the letter library
# 1,061: sunday morning
#133: the office
# 50: james joyce
# 471: a particularised history of cocaine
# 1,002: rome; a play in ten lines
# 299: thank you tony
# 1,463: michael jackson
# 986: winter
# 1,600: in england
# 701: maslow
# 1,094: billy the kid retires, marries & turns to poetry
# 1,744: the hippocritopotamus
# 842: wittgenstein 2
# 1,231: shopping
# 170: the divorce rate
# 1,192: osama bin laden
the smog: London poems
the london weather news
untitled
three london poems
zone
jogging in the country park
any normal day in dagenham
london migration sequence
The Hutton Inquiry
so every book is a car, then?
a new iraqi flag
a late arrival
crikey
high-risk sunday league strategy
some trinkets: for Sarah
some trinkets
a note for sarah
shortwood
slices
the girl who cried fox
a christmas poem
fairy tale: the wolf & the book
uttoxeter
delicious
lanky shire horse
of the wife
poodlehaired
lobster–pink face
shot frozen
side–eyed
sly statistics
approach.
rough patch
of the honeymoon
delicate–edged
six & a half inch
crystal high–heels
& won’t pay
to reverse the charges
on a past vasectomy
to travel back
to the place
of having children
to have his manhood
ripped open
you can’t claim for that
you know
& talking is different
from fantasizing.
wedding day’s
mantlepiece–arched mind
still standing around
in starched brown suits
then this:
pink torpedo
of last night’s
lipstick &
rolled silver
eyelids of
popped paracetamols.
old marriage kids
don’t like new dad’s
pissy–iced persona
ringing up mum —
how can people fall out of love —
& hanging up
Unpublished endorsement
: Chris McCabe is amongst the younger poets
who give me hope for the future of English poetry.
David Miller
Unpublished endorsement
: How great to find a poet who has the receptiveness
to take in all the details of the urban world and who also has
the energy to challenge that world and demand change.
Andrew Duncan
Review quote: Chris McCabe's debut is shorter than Hutton's original report, but still an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century. McCabe writes with the lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage. […] The whole book zooms by sparking with spot-on phrases.
Play 
Contact
us
