Rod Mengham

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Biographical note:  Rod Mengham lives and works in Cambridge. He has written books on Henry Green, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens and on language and cultural history; he has also edited books on violence and the artistic imagination and on modernist and contemporary fiction. He is the editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of the new anthology of contemporary Polish poetry, Altered State (Arc, 2003).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857127
ISBN-10:  1876857129
ISBN-13:  9781876857127
Author:  Rod Mengham
Title:  Unsung
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:  “Sculpture is a part of the space around it.” This statement by Katarzyna Kobro reflects Mengham’s sense of how he wants the poetic text to relate to the languages that surround it. He has a set of ongoing preoccupations which are catalyzed by pronounced occasions, private and public. Ideally each text would be both univocal and multivocal, expressive and typical; since Mengham relies on a lot on circumstance, there is a great deal of personal input into the poems, but this is not meant to contribute primarily to a representation of the self, more towards a presentation of work for the reader to do. What kind of work? Certain kinds of semantic and syntactical derangement which Mengham hopes has a signature without constituting mere routines. He tries to catch the material in a state that remembers what it was like just prior to organization. And then in the process of composition there is an attempt to control this prehistoric material with particular attention to overall movement, phrasing, consonance and figure (which is to say, idea-rhymes). The distance between starting out and finishing is most obvious in the prose poems where you can see the agenda, perhaps even a theme or set of themes, that the text essays, as well as the curve it enters as a rhythm and an acoustic repertoire and conceptual and visual variations take over. It is less obvious but actually more extreme in the other poems.

Table of contents:
Local History
From ‘12 Minutes in a Firing Squad’
From ‘Dear Balzac & all the little Balzacs’
A Luminous Band or Track
Beds & Scrapings
The Big Wind
Polyalbum
From Polyalbum (uncollected)
Glossy Matter
Poem
Glow-Worms
Year Zero
Marsyas
Stolen Fires
Unsung
Neutrinos
Nomenclature
Dogs on Sticks
Down in the Mouth
Kobro
31/12/92
No Resolve
The Dog Star
Take a Bite
The Boeotarchs Shall Hear of This
From an Alley
The Snake on the Road by the Canning Bridge
Wish-Bones
This Is A Warning Letter
Prolegomena to the Echo
Names in the Bark
Prepare to Meet Your Date
To the Soviet Embalmers
7/8/97
Two Continents as a Medium for Poetry
Smitten
The Stoa
Another Name for the Cassiterides
Allegory of Good Government
I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One
Nostratic Lament
Allegory of Bad Government
Friend on the Rocks of the Shore of the Night
Marriage to the Sea
Concession to Perpetuity No. 166

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Excerpt from book:  

Wish-Bones

Sing, muse, of the dentist
on Indian Hill who
fixed my teeth with no charge.

Come in, she said, my lips
leave nothing to be desired but
keep an uneasy peace.

Scrape the mould off your joints
and sit down. Carthago delenda est.

Now when I think of
my short-of-breath pandaemonium

I think of having a good rub down
by the light of Italian stars.

On they come to where they vanish
longitudinally.

Here where the owl hoots by the hammer ponds
and the fox cries for something to operate on
by moonlight. Let the cat out who can

it is time to reach for the sky

in pliable wash-leather gloves.

Review quote:  There are oblique images of sexual encounter, which you want to read into a single scenario, as you want to read the fragments into the title. The tension is palpable. As is the precision, the careful wording of everything he does.

Keith Jebb
Poetry Review

Review quote:  An insanely scrupulous act of writing.

John Wilkinson

Review quote:  A beautiful, belligerent laconicism.

Drew Milne

Review quote:  The combination of such a resourceful literary intelligence and an ear for the physical workings of words is rare.

Geoff Ward