Andrew Duncan

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Biographical note:  Andrew Duncan studied as a mediaevalist and started writing in punk fanzines. He has been publishing poetry since the late 70s, including In a German Hotel, Anxiety Before Entering a Room, Sound Surface, Surveillance and Compliance. He was one of the editors of Angel Exhaust and has translated much modern German poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844711116
ISBN-10:  1844711110
ISBN-13:  9781844711116
Author:  Andrew Duncan
Title:  The Imaginary in Geometry
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:  112pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  168 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content – going straight to personal myth. The Imaginary in Geometry is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation – but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux’s definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies – Anglophilia, a Romance of the Docks is a lingering exploration of the lost world of mid-century propaganda, the alluring stories of a leisure class in ideal clothes. Photographs open onto a beckoning space of generosity and inauthenticity, a glittering demon world which engulfs us we say yes to it. How indeed would we reconstruct the Past once we discard these pop images with their discreet divinities? More fundamental than a mythic narrative is the fabric of the space in which it takes place as a momentary series of high points. Symbolic space is something non-finite which can be built up by finite steps. On the Beach at Aberystwyth is a journey in another geometry, the Western Seaways as the routes along which Celtic culture spread. It answers the question, what is social structure?

Early preoccupations with Socialist Realism and technophilia are continued here by poems about the inventor of double-tracking and a Spiritualist clergyman who constructed a machine of unknown purpose at the command of spirits.

Table of contents:
Coastal Defences of the Self
Abundance
The Ruins of Guldursun
Deep Dish
Dished
Spectrum Flight
The Ghost of Fusion
A Building Code for Jerusalem
Wonders of Classification
A Virtuality/ Cyclical Polygons
Swanning with the Bishop
Les Paul’s Garage Studio
Radio Vortex
On the Beach at Aberystwyth
Anglophilia — a Romance of the Docks
I Baltic Relief Mission
II The Room of Light
III Putting England on film
IV Documentary
V Darling, Let’s Stop Pretending
VI Collusion
VII The moving Line of Capture
VIII Silver Threads and Golden Needles
IX Trust
X Q-landscapes
XI The Outlands
XII Radio Wars
XIII Like Spring Water Strained Through Muslin
XIV A Failed Collection
XV The Forgetting
100 Bars of Inattention or, The Social Order
The Spirit Mover, 1854
Wonders of Classification, Part 2 or, The Builder of Follies
When Myth Becomes History
2 On the Margins of Great Civilisations
3 Anagoge or, When History Becomes Myth
History of My Contemporary

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Excerpt from book:  

Abundance

Mood pulses in actinic glare
Wegener’s three–colour system
three vertices of a catching frame

Light swooping through frissons of ice
Thaws the coloured pane and freezes
The summer pastures of Greenland

The North Atlantic rush of a feathered turbine
swooping onto timed abundances
the flickering upwelling feast
the balmy fat–smeared surfaces
rattle of wing–racks

Shore to which they soar in summer skeins
fatal beyond Faeroe

Humus too poor for thorps and acres
Incorruptible in the dusk of declension
The wrong island
the effect of latitude on group size

Scant askance slats of sunshine
Slight aslant tints
skimming the captor mesh
grudging

Instrument scales on the objectless plane of light
notches against ice–blink
straining of sight on white
unscattered clarity where distance is near
trueness where farness is too sheer

scaleless blank plane
the eye flat falling without eyefast
from Lewis to the last land

Wisps of heat dissipation
Drafting crystal austere polygons
Starring of sea–ice from petalled edges
Feathers flicking thermal flakes

Unpublished endorsement :  Andrew Duncan writes a poetry of possibility. To read The Geometry of the Imaginary is to stumble into the richness of things, to be thrown, startled, into exhilarating new vistas. It is a pleasure to glimpse Marrakesh from the beach at Aberystwyth. Try this book. Explore it.

David Herd

Unpublished endorsement :  Ilm al-hay’a: elastic scattering is a diffractive process, largely determined by an imaginary amplitude calculated from the sum of all possible production-channels. Many of these are presently so jammed or damaged that polarisations change signs and then change again: there are dips and wiggles in angular distributions, ‘the documentation that has to be delivered.’ For the last thirty years, Andrew Duncan has patiently traced alternative wavelengths, to and from the unevocable, irreconcilable and the impossible. The Imaginary in Geometry asks how the substitution of an ideal nature for the ‘prescientific’ field-theory of sense-perception throws up figures. Some of these are nameable, as ‘Galileo’, ‘Kubrick’, ‘Tallents’ etc. Others enshade the buildings and parkways like nuclear silhouettes. In tagging them, we too become Algebra.

Kevin Nolan