Dennis Haskell

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Biographical note:  Dennis Haskell is the author or editor of 16 books, including poetry, literary and social criticism, and literary scholarship. His four previous books of poetry include a Selected Poems published in the UK, titled Samuel Johnson in Marrickville. He has has given readings of his poetry in many countries, including England, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, and the USA. He is Co-editor of the Australian literary magazine Westerly, and teaches at The University of Western Australia.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712533
ISBN-10:  1844712532
ISBN-13:  9781844712533
Author:  Dennis Haskell
Title:  All the Time in the World
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-06
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 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Swinging between the “hysterically quiet’ of Australian towns and China’s commercialisation of Mao, between allegorical voyages and densities of affection, Dennis Haskell’s All the Time in the World provides explorations of the nature of truth and the meaning – if any – of human emotions. Language stands here in varying relations to the world, sometimes fragile, sometimes firm, in portraying a deep link between “the unsayable” and the ordinary.

Is love meaningless or utterly valuable? Are the meanings of human life discovered or made? Is identity rooted in place or flying about a globalised world? The book explores meanings underwritten by death, and pits a breadth of language against the values of a contemporary world dominated by the anonymity of money.

Table of contents:
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
A Thin Piece of Light
Ars Poetica
In Refutation of a Former Aesthetic
Whatever Happened
Encomium to an Inebriate
Lines pour les Symbolistes
Contemporary Tatlers
A Defence of Poetry
The Gaze Averted
Ward of the Iceflow
The Failures of Art
BELONGINGS
Still Life, 2001
On Chennai Beach
The Last Emperor
Reality's Conquests
Bologna Morning
Understandings
In Madrid, 1971
Writ in Water
In Search of Synge
Ode to Edinburgh, without Irony
In Churchill College Library
Walking in England, late-November
The Last of England
After Hong Kong
Doubt and Trembling
The Squirrel
AUSTRALIA IN CITY AND TOWN
Aesthetics in a Crowded Age
A Portrait
In a Sunburnt Country
Globalisation
Sydney or the Bush
That World Whose Sanity We Know
Lemon-scented Gums
Brightly Shone the Moon
At Middleton Beach
Inland Sea
PAINTED LIVES
Girl Wearing a Turban
The Raising of the Cross
Two Landscapes
Fiori, 1924
Fiori, 1924
Evil Pandanus Spirit
PRESENCE, BLOOD, ABSENCE
Constancy
Shoal Bay
Why
On Hearing that an Apparently Prudent Friend has Left his Wife and Kids for a Younger Woman
Purpose
Letter to Rhonda
Le Voyage
Temperatures
Felix Culpa
Counting the Days
Hand to Chin
Darling Street, Balmain
The Departure
There to Hear and See
"I am Well, Who are you?"
An Act of Defiance
NOTES

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Excerpt from book:  

After Hong Kong

Ground speed 500 mph on
ground that isn't there
measurable only by noise
that arcs over each wing:
we navigate by our ears
as this horizontal stunted yacht
edges forward inch by drawn–out inch.
At 35,000 feet,
up here where our only ambience is air,
we are racked
like pieces of toast,
food becomes an imitation
of itself, our bodies held
in an impossible passivity;
all movement
stymied, on our tongues
our words somehow
become open–ended. Bumptious shuddering
creates Picasso's weeping woman
—two eyes to one side of her face—
time slides over the faces
of Dali's dripping clocks.
If Plato had
only reached such heights
he would never have needed a cave.
Here all is air

so wholly unnatural
within us and without
that you could hope never
to breathe again.
In the ant–heap
of Hong Kong
we swam through air
as thick as expectation.
Now perched
atop the world
dry–eyed, dry–eared, heavy
in body and light in mind,
we find such levity

was not drawn up for sense
and long for the thump
only ground can give us,
the beating and the battery
that the body was built for,
gravity's brutal reward.

Unpublished endorsement :  Whether imagining ‘hysterical phlegm’ in a bush town or England ‘passing away from us,’ Dennis Haskell’s voice is ironically elegiac. An Antipodean Larkin with good manners, Haskell is a new kind of Australian poet, a mile-sky-high traveler, speeding on trains, stepping over countries, a twenty-first century transnational whose poems feel their way into an ‘ordinariness’ he has set as his goal. A sharp observer of the itinerant – as he says of himself, ‘my eyes … the children of my face’ – Haskell’s witty poems insistently quest for meaning in country, language, love, the lovely ordinary of his global ambit, and uncover it in slips of the tongue and slippery memories.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Unpublished endorsement :  Agreeing that the resources of English ‘must be kept up’, Dennis Haskell in his new work creates a dialogue between modernist improvisation and the traditional pleasures of poetry. The result is a book that is full of verbal play and sparkle. But beyond that, as the finest poets do, he takes us out onto the depths of feeling.

Robert Gray