Andrew Duncan

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Biographical note:  Andrew Duncan was born in 1956, and brought up in the Midlands, “in an atmosphere of technological optimism and class levelling which the South succeeded in reversing thereafter.” He worked as a labourer (in England and Germany) after leaving school, and subsequently as a project planner with a telecomms manufacturer (1978–87), and as a programmer for the Stock Exchange (1988–91).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857035
ISBN-10:  187685703X
ISBN-13:  9781876857035
Author:  Andrew Duncan
Title:  Anxiety Before Entering a Room
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jan-01
Extent:  136pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  204 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  It’s the tail end of the Seventies, the severity of hypothetical Marxism has given way to the anti-humanism of punk. In a province, someone anglophobe and technophile is attempting to write documentary poetry about the situation at work, where the basic power relations never slip out of mind: an unending cascade of concrete and puzzling problems, of human conjunctures. The real ordinance of society follows an ideology which is secret, covered by a false public one; other forms of consciousness are a shifting set of part-patterns. All around, a generation of English poets are connecting their output to their input. A cultural blockade comes down over all poetry except the most subservient. Filtered expanses of monochrome nuance concealed the fact that nothing was being said. The industrial recession of the Thatcher years lays bare the fragility of every social and psychological structure. Somewhere in the underground of North London, the invisibility allows a constant approximation to popular culture. The infinite compression of punk breaks up into a boundless release, the rediscovery of melody and colour. Melancholic and esoteric virtuosity in deserted spaces is interrupted by a troupe of bedizened dropouts, impossibly nimble and competitive, and is redirected towards bright patched surfaces. The attack by the State and the South on a whole engineering civilisation is protested by the construction of complex symbolic machines. A lucid equivalent of turmoil is not the same as unstable maps of instability.

Table of contents:
from In a German Hotel (1977—78)
1. Absence
2. Poem Two
4. Pissing Blood
6.
Shape, scored in earth
from Threads of Iron (1980—81)
Dead Wind
On First Publication
Black pane and decor
Dhofar
“Laughing Man”: self-portrait by Richard Gerstl
Turkish Music
In Charnwood
Almond Wind: Lament for Osip Mandelshtam
For an artist having died in his dreams
from Skeleton Looking at Chinese Pictures (1983—87)
Hic jacet Borbonius heros
Griffin Carved in Walrus Ivory
Light
About living opposite the Brewery in Brick Lane
The June Sun cast as the absent lover
Those are jewels that were his eyes
Night Train
The metallic autumn
Shapeshifting and Mismatches
from Sound Surface (1992)
Jadis j’ai cru
Circular
The Doll’s House
from Surveillance and Compliance (1987—92)
Roots of a Revolution
The policy of weakness
Heat Loss
At Camden Lock
Shiny circuitry
Over and Over
Fragments of the Above
Dialogue poems
from poems of 1991—6
At Cumae
Three graves
18.4.91: Transparent radiation
For C.
Wind and Wear in Aix-en-Provence
Martyrdom and Triumph of Sergei Korolev
Chronique mondaine of the Fifth Poetry Conference in a Regional Style
from Pauper Estate (1996—9)
Looks like luxury and feels like a disease
Adesso non posso
At the Lido
Collection towards the definition of a word
Least Energy Structures
Snow-puffed plumage

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Excerpt from book:  

Circular

A noise comes off the highway
From the metal plates shaking
Numbering the surface of waste energies;
From the hot pipes of the steel throat
In the pinned fabric of motion
The sound rushes across the road shore & rims.

Blast apron
Hard sound over the inadequates
In the pitted surface of the media slew
In the middle of eight million faces.

The motorized column covers its section of loop.
The messages were effaced.
A citadel of numb skin,
Signs arrested
Rooms in the throb of fuel chambers.
The specific metallic signal,
Shivering and blowing away words,
The unwriter of thoughts & patterns.

Along the rims
A certain group moves in to low prices.
They don’t understand the signals too well anyway,
It doesn’t matter.
You memorized the map that got you here.

No escape by eating transit. A swarm glutted & limed
On foodstuff, stampede of cars
Going round and round between close walls,
Lost migration on the Lost Highway.
One way passage down the throat of insensate words
Laminar sounds peaking to blank uproar
Movements overlaying to a complete circle.
This is the message you were built to hear.
Look for a crack.

Review quote:  [T]he poems range over the planet, through history, across cultures, always with a sense of rootedness in a historical / cultural consciousness.

Keith Jebb
Poetry Review

Review quote:  Duncan has long been known as the editor of the exceptional magazine Angel Exhaust and a feisty controversialist, yet despite seven volumes, his poetry seems to be less known than he is. This book should redress the balance.

Keith Jebb
Poetry Review