The Roads

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David Kennedy The Roads
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: David Kennedy was born in Leicester in 1959. He co-edited The New Poetry and is the author of New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994. He edited the magazine of innovative poetry and poetics The Paper from 2000 to 2004 and publishes widely on contemporary British and Irish poetry. His publications include The President of Earth: New and Selected Poems; The Dice Cup, translations of Max Jacob’s prose poems with Christopher Pilling; and the collaboration Eight Excursions with Rupert Loydell. Monographs on Douglas Dunn and on elegy are forthcoming, respectively, in the Northcote House series Writers and Their Work and in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom. David lives in Sheffield with his wife Christine. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844711079 ISBN-10: 1844711072 ISBN-13: 9781844711079 Author: David Kennedy Title: The Roads Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 10-Dec-04 Extent: 144pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 9 mm Weight: 216 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 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£10.99~~ £8.79 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$16.95~~ $13.56	Short description/annotation: David Kennedy’s new collection takes us on remarkable journeys. From Korea to Poland and beyond, from deeply affecting elegies to comic constitutionals through culture, The Roads ranges far and wide. In its pages, we meet poets, painters, vampires and giant red horses, and Kennedy shows us poetry as ways of doing things and places we can go. Main description: At the heart of David Kennedy’s new collection is a sequence of elegies: for the poet’s father, poets Jack Beeching, Ric Caddel and Kenneth Koch, the actor Anton Walbrook and the critic Nicholas Zurbrugg. These brilliantly crafted and deeply affecting poems seek out forms and language that are appropriate not only for their subjects but for the work of mourning and consolation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What results is an exploration of poetry as behaviour and habitation. These concerns dominate The Roads as Kennedy guides readers on exterior and interior journeys that take in lives clinging to the stony plateaux of the Auvergne and the paintings of Egon Schiele or probe the beginnings of language and the inhospitable distortions of officialese. The Roads rejects hierarchies of poetic propriety and sees a mature, confident artist exploring the full range of his concerns with exuberance and originality. The book also brings Kennedy’s much-admired sequence on Joseph Cornell’s boxes to a wider audience. Table of contents: The Roads The Enchanted Lake Red Horse Poem with Hand and Small Fish The Roads Warsaw Nights Balloon : Fig A Rare Part of History Another Moment: A Georgic on the Eve of the Invasion of Iraq, 30th March 2003 666 FM Indoors This Is Korea Walking Book 553 Steps Around Auzon Minster The Opposite of Writing The Haunting Words The Process of Language The Preservation of Light On Reading John Kinsella’s Peripheral Light Rehearsing Two of Ric Caddel’s ‘5 Career Moves . . .’ for a Reading Schiele Sprechgesang Lucky Garden Night Blues from The Book of Roads Dhromi: The Roads The Graves Dr. Kennedy’s Country Dream Books of the Dead At Anton Walbrook’s Grave My Father’s Deaths Egyptian Elegy for My Father Alum Raptures Six Staves for Koch’s Grave Postcards of Penthesilea Poem Begun in a Small Notebook Call & Response History of the Woe The Larks Advice To All Girls In Love Bohemian Fantasy Chef in the Dusk Found on a Flipchart Fabula Rasa Ink Tunes Art Texts — 1 Lament of the River My Dream Tom Raworth’s Oklahoma Windows My Dream Alan Halsey’s Sentences Cool Down My Dream Frances Presley Delivers A Book My Dream Picasso Shows Me The Secret Myth in Samoa Poem Art Texts — 2 Symphonie Fantastique ‘Teach Yourself Criticism: The Texas Poetry Examiner’ The Return of the Art of Poetry The Wild Anger is Tired of Soap What To Eat in Poland, or, We Say What We See When I Was Spanish Word Girl Art Texts — 3 Cornell: A Circuition Around His Circumambulation View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (68 KB) Excerpt from book: A Rare Part of History The past streams off us into the future and when it’s all gone we will be what we were again – nothing. In the arts centre, it’s 1975. Different lifts go to odd and even floors and the carpets are psychedelic ice floes beginning to break up in early spring. Somehow we’ve made it to hear the old poet mumbling through his once–in–a–decade reading. He doesn’t want to be here because he's been where it's at and it wasn’t here. The audience is old people who haven't been out since 1969 and young people who wish they could look like that without the same effort of self–denial. The old people think where it’s at is wherever the old poet is but since the old poet doesn't want to be wherever he’s supposed to be, where it's at is always already somewhere else. And the old poet says, “The instruction 0x77f52004 is an application error and is better half–remembered”. And the oldest members of the audience answer, “The referenced memory 0x007f4f10 could not be written”. So this is a rare part of history where everyone goes home happy. Review quote: Kennedy offers an unblinking poetics free of specious closure … The journey, as in Cavafy’s ‘Ithika’, is all. One arrives at the end of his poems … entranced. Poetry Review Review quote: He has an obvious lyric talent and the poems are often artfully under-written; they have an oddly shifted sense of perspective, perhaps with just a dash of that New York hot sauce … Kennedy’s I’s … are exteriorised, ironised, not the never-ending celebrations of self that one sees so often. Shearsman