E. A. Markham

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Biographical note:  E A Markham was born in 1939, he has lived mainly in Britain and Europe since the mid-1950s. He has built houses in France, worked as a media co-ordinator in Papua New Guinea and directed the Caribbean Theatre Workshop. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

Biographical note:  

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857684
ISBN-10:  1876857684
ISBN-13:  9781876857684
Author:  E. A. Markham
Title:  Lambchops with Sally Goodman
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Dec-04
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 9.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This passionate and incisive book gathers together poems written by E.A. Markham under a range of pseudonyms and personae. Exploring perceptions of race and gender, community and identity, Markham steers us in to a world filled with peculiar menace, threats and resistance, all redeemed or repudiated by the force of language.

E.A. Markham has written many works. His poetry includes titles such as Cross-Fire (1972); Mad and Other Poems (1973); Lambchops in Disguise (1976); Love Poems (1978); Love, Politics, and Food (1982); Human Rites: Selected Poems 1970-82 (1984); Toward the End of a Century (1989); and Misapprehensions (1995).

Table of contents:
Preface
Dedication and acknowledgements
Introduction by Paula Burnett
PART ONE: LAMBCHOPS
A Chorus
Lambchops Alienated
A Mugger’s Game
Lambchops Has a Problem
Yet Another Father
Racial Prejudice Day
Death in the Family
Lambchops Has Black Thoughts
Lambchops B.A.
Lambchops Protests with his Person-friend
Ode on the Death of a Rich Man
Lambchops Wrestles with his Love-letter
Lambchops’ Ally
A Slow Developer
Black Man’s Curse
Lambchops Goes into Training
Shortneck
For Us All, Melvin Armstrong
People’s Summit
Progress
Power
Brother Disguise
‘Dad Lives, OK?’
PART TWO: PHILPOT AND MAUREEN
Change of Signature
Philpot in the City
A Long Time Going
A House-husband Called Philpot
A Council House for My Horse
Appeal
Philpot Puzzled
Philpot’s Progress
Philpot Unfit For Active Service
Philpot’s Mirror
Queueing
Philpot Feels the Pressure
Crossing the Fence
Middle Age
The Potato Patch
Burial at Sea
Adult Education
Maureen’s Turn
PART THREE: LAMBCHOPS IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA (1983-85)
Lambchops’ Love Letter to Magpie
Cousin Philpot’s Letters
The Shotgun Cult
The Black Priest
Expat. Third Class
Love Among the Experts
Sir Johnelsom Wantok Rewrites History
Not the Heyoka Ceremony
World Bank Man
End of a Project
PART FOUR: SALLY GOODMAN (THE HOUSEWIFE’S REVENGE)
Conversation Across Water
Conman
Butcher
A Man, Armed
Sunday
The Morning After
Val’s Party
Graduate in the Family
Make Love, Not War
Going Cheap
Fishing
The Red Rose
Branded
A Skilled Person
The Bitch
Learning
A Proposition
The Group
Classical Feast
The Housewife’s Revenge
Poem:
A Love Letter
Error & Error
Against the Revolution
Bibliography

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Excerpt from book:  

Power

She must kiss me
in spite of my bad teeth.

I will advertise my defects
to enhance her. Having worn

my name to a joke
I will give it to her.

Later, when I grow ethnic
having suffered angst

of Cultural Revolutions
I will spend the slow decades

shunning disciples
like this good woman.

Till we decide to do it differently
and outdo the other

in the trick of modesty.
On her twelfth language

of atonement, she sits at my feet, student
of Everything. Syllogizing,

All women are mine, etc.
I look down her dress


for synthesis. When she falls
into Error, I smile and forgive

her. That’s power.
Or I might change my mind.

Unpublished endorsement :  In poetry as elsewhere, Archie Markham is tireless in his resistance to orthodoxy, whether artistic, cultural or political. He speaks as he finds, in multiple, unpredictable voices. His great imaginative wealth is a refusal ever to explain, still less to apologize for, his sidelong, audacious explorations of how people actually think and feel. Markham is an original.

Sean O’Brien

Unpublished endorsement :  Archie Markham’s ventriloquy matches his migratory spirit. Each of his personas appears to dodge the idea of the writer as a purveyor of a single voice or identity for the calysonian’s and trickster spider’s alternative of a chorus of voices. He keeps his readers guessing and engaged and coincidentally charts the last 35 years of British poetry from a triple perspective: firstly, the colonised subject on a quest for a decolonised space; secondly, the roving artist who insists on a satirist outlook as a prerequisite for creativity; and thirdly, the gendered body delimited by the poetic imagination. All this adds up to laugh-out-loud reading fun and has the cumulative effect of a chronicler's wisdom for the age.

Fred D’Aguiar

Unpublished endorsement :  From behind his disarmingly anti-heroic masks, Markham scores oblique but telling hits on a variety of targets, among them cultural smugness, racial and social prejudice, political correctness, and a too easy assumption of historically given roles, whether of victor or victim. He is master of a tart, intellectually tough, low-key zaniness, and turns a refreshingly wry scrutiny on the immigrant experience.

Edward Baugh