Biographical note: Ian Gregson was born in Manchester and educated at Oxford and Hull. He has written for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and published poems and reviews in the London Review of Books, the TLS and Poetry Review, amongst others. His critical books are Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism; The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry (both published by Macmillan); Postmodern Literature (Hodder Arnold: 2004) and Character and Satire in Post War Fiction (Continuum, 2006). His current critical project is The New Poetry In Wales for the University of Wales Press, and that book will appear in 2007. He has lived most of his adult life in North Wales where he teaches in the English department at the university in Bangor.
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EAN13: 9781844712564 ISBN-10: 1844712567 ISBN-13: 9781844712564 Author: Ian Gregson Title: Call Centre Love Song Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Jun-06 Extent: 132pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 8 mm Weight: 198 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation:SHORT-LISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS BEST FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE (FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2006). In his long-awaited first collection, Ian Gregson probes life as we know it, faulty, finicky, sensual and at times beautifully redemptive. Packed with wit and wisdom, Gregson’s poetry has long been admired as it spanned the pages of many major journals; here, at last, he delivers the goods in a superb and impressive debut.
Main description:SHORT-LISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS BEST FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE (FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2006). This is a collection of poems by a writer who is fully aware of the complexities of modernist and postmodernist poetry and is able to draw upon them when they are useful, but who aims to be as accessible as possible, and to approach urgent personal and political themes directly. He employs a wide range of forms (including, for example, free verse and ottava rima) and a wide range of genres (including dramatic monologue, narrative and lyric) in order to disrupt stale expectations and to avoid acquiring a ‘voice’ – and all the earnest, narcissistic wind associated with that.
The speakers of the poems include a call centre worker who falls in love with a client; an aristocratic Englishman cast by Hollywood as a villain; a retired Civil War general; a Victorian rambler unsettled by an Anglesey copper mine; Thomas the Tank Engine with an identity crisis; a stalker; a housewife scanning the personal columns; a sex guru; and Superman and Lois Lane. One poem takes the form of voices on an answerphone, another of a text message.
The themes of the poems include Venetian political history; a driver who falls asleep at the wheel; The Creature from the Black Lagoon; fear of vasectomy; a police detective on the trail of a pair of murders; contemporary pagans; a man who is diagnosed with a terminal illness who, without telling anyone, sails away in his yatcht; and an unnerving encounter with a coypu.
Table of contents: THE PERSONALS txt Call Centre Love Song How I Invented Sex That Change The Personals The Roof Someone to Watch Over You A Foreign Body My Husband is an Alien — A Professional Worrier Hughes & Heaney & Sons Couvade How Does It Feel? I’m English, and Wicked The Adman’s Breakdown Boggart Holes Writing in Milk Pagan Rob Parys Mountain (1) Parys Mountain (2) Phallic Shit Freeze Frame A Coypu IN THE TWIN CITY The Great Escape in the twin city Animations The Breakwater Why I’m Too Cowardly to Have a Vasectomy Deconstructionists on Fast Forward Shadowing Thomas the Tank Engine Reaches Puberty The Hawk at the Shrink Voice Over Elusive Boy Fast Asleep Fast Asleep Too Carriers of the End Following the Charts The Creature from the Black Lagoon (U.S. 1952) Vengeance is Mine The Vicar and the Rag and Bone Man Happy the Man THE SICK ROOM A Dislocation The Sick Room In the New House A Dental Appointment Her Mother’s Way From Whose Bourn The Smaller Picture SUPERMAN AND LOIS Superman Lois Superman Superman Lois Superman Lois Superman Superman SULTRY The Café Bar of Rejection Saturday Night Revisited Fully Explained For in the Picture Sat a Plywood Gap Undercurrents of Easter Sultry
My mind was deep in shoes that 5 a.m. my dad had died. I’d worked on how in shoes the tongue is tied down tight: it could unloose and speak – but now that went all wrong. The shoes had let me down. They lied.
I grew up watching my dad’s ideas he’d talked about – between my programs, clever, funny ads where jolly brave homunculi were fighting the kitchen clean. He made the products hear and see
and entered their needy spirit, their needing to be needed that powered their sexy allure. The teasing prospects that inspire it made me say, one day, he traded only tricks, he was a liar –
but after I grew excited by what an ad–man can command: I saw the screen grow sensitive as though responding to my hand, I felt my own desire requited watching the products change, and live:
this sofa longs to feel a body enter its embrace; this car’s familiar with a place where mountains melt into an ocean, clouds at dawn are parting to reveal frustrations dispersing in constant motion –
until that 5 a.m. when shoes were sticking out their tongues. The things – I grew so scared of them, their quiet voices, hidden thought. Hoovers were humming manic songs. And all the things dad bought,
I never believed as much in – these appliances that learn to talk, conspiring in the dark of the kitchen, televisions that learn to walk: the screen’s big brain that springs to life a fork that whispers, a smiling knife.
Unpublished endorsement : Ian Gregson’s work is remarkable in combining a postmodernist’s sense of ‘things being various’ with a traditionalist’s concern for shape and completeness. These poems are utterly contemporary in their relish of popular culture, daring in their treatment of the slippery politics of business and literature, and coolly haunting as they manoeuvre in and out of the marginalised lyric centres of private love and mourning. Like a twenty-first century MacNeice, Gregson yokes pluralities and polyphonies with a wiry formal line, and creates poetry that is strongly centred. Though he adopts many identities, the voice is always his own: intellectually challenging but sensuous, immediate and approachable. Track these calls and watch the connections scintillate.
Carol Rumens
Unpublished endorsement : Here’s an independent voice – fearless I'd say, but vulnerable. Gregson’s a connoisseur of neuroses – including his own – and a wily chronicler of what we don’t mean to say when we strive to communicate. There's wit here and a bashful playfulness but what I value most in these poems is a remembrance of how a child sees the world, and how that vision darkens and decays.
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