Biographical note: Born in rural Cheshire in 1944 David Chaloner spent his early years dreaming of escape. As the closest city, Manchester provided a cultural and social context for his early writing, when jazz was available in clubs created from empty cotton warehouses and Granada Television struggled with the idea of a new arts programme that included poetry. Apart from ‘Little Press’ publication, the first published work appeared in the Tandem paperback ‘Generation X’, a true sociological record of the times, and the Penguin anthology, ‘Children of Albion’. In the late sixties he founded ONE, a magazine for new writing, that existed through the transitional years of a move to London in the early seventies. A continuing sense of enquiry and curiosity informs his work and helps in pushing the possibilities of language, music and image in varying and divers ways.
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EAN13: 9781876857752 ISBN-10: 1876857757 ISBN-13: 9781876857752 Author: David Chaloner Title: Collected Poems Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Sep-05 Extent: 456pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 26 mm Weight: 684 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 18.99 Price: USD 26.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation: David Chaloner’s landmark Collected Poems offers us a spectacular journey into a restless, generous and incisive mind. Pondering on technology, politics, fashion and the emotions, and using typographic and formal experiment, Chaloner tackles the densities of meaning; we journey with him, captivated by his constant and continuing themes, intelligence and vision.
Main description: This landmark Collected Poems from one of Britain’s major post-war poets, gathers together work from over four decades, and includes previously unpublished material that has remained outside the scope of Chaloner’s major collections.
In drawing the book together, Chaloner has updated and revised poems into a thematic whole, a decision supported by the remarkable consistency of vision, inquiry and purpose in his work. What we have is a magnum opus, a chronological sweep through Britain’s dynamic and troubled reinvention from the Sixties to the present day extending his range from the intimate and local to the social and global. Chaloner’s personal battleground is the truth, but his writing is a triumph of poise and tone. His is primarily a poetry of sensibility, and we are accompanied rather than addressed, encouraged rather than admonished.
From the early ruralist poems of wry, intimate observation to the recent critical visions of the Twenty-first Century world, Chaloner’s focus remains undaunted, locating us in the here and now, with our eyes faced forward on to the future, a future we are all responsible for and into which we must all travel.
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Table of contents: Uncollected Early Poems Wish You Were Here “Tonight the glass is filled frequently …” “white flakes peel from the wall …” Vesalii Icones(Andreas Vesalius: De Humani Corporis Fabrica) “I cannot move …” “disappearance is rendered more terrible for being so complete …” Going Out For Cigarettes Poem for Mary “a quick gesture attracts my attention …” The Photographs “because you are …” “this place …” “leaning over …” “you do not believe in the definition of wall …” “let us say that by his presence he intimidates …” “he adapts to the inertia in the room …” “there are times …” dark pages slow turns brief salves (1969) “it is …” “the day slips …” “star gazer …” “I speak of one …” “you are …” “so we watch him totter …” “that speech gags the mouth & words sleep …” “not simply this …” “take …” “such gleanings …” “delicately …” “not that …” “lady …” “horde …” “an exorcism …” “the folds …” Gift “awake to your savagery as you rent the turf’s …” “the window …” “oyster-catchers throng the striated shore …” “do we speak of the metaphor …” “we make the silence …” “journeys wld be the measure …” “usually it’s early morning …” “wld say it thus …” “rooks from the trees black as the …” “the wild duck …” “broken line traces out condition …” for David Sims against wall “a child stamps its foot …” “what “time” could dispel …” A Personal Poem “moving round you the sun its axis the sun …” Sunlight “did I say from here we can hear …” Year of Meteors (1972) “Five hours of darkness fill the window …” Breakfast Twice “voices flap deviously …” The Hotel Temporary “From Walt Whitman …” “broken ornaments …” “you walk through the door and a year passes …” “it becomes a monday morning inside the clock …” “an incoming tide …” “fatigue creeps closer under the awning …” Chocolate Sauce (1973) “a pattern emerges …” Swirl “sunlight slants in through the window …” “the problem the grass under the saplings …” “he is exploring the inertia of the room …” “move …” “to go adrift seemingly given extra time to receive …” Itch The Situation The Photographs Domestic Scenes “a landslide carries the background from sight …” Racers Exercise “not merely false starts …” Texture “the patrons sip their drinks …” “as we drive back today from yesterday …” “surf falls noisily along the tunnel of half-closed …” “recently having returned from a long journey …” “and the nets hung on …” “your arrival is delayed in the public address system …” “instinctively advances towards adventure …” Visiting The Cast in Order of Appearance “hard trees shake furtively …” Coda Dilemma Doors “undisclosed destinations lurk in benzedrine timetables …” “the ramp gives us a new idea …” “the notes tell of earlier occasions …” The Swimming-Pool Saga “you do not believe in the wall …” “before sleep you notice …” “standing in open space confidently …” “dear reader this was to have been a letter …” Cameo “the former arbiter cruises slowly …” “a cleaned-out sensation passes around the room …” Projections (1977) “the first restless flaws of morning …” Changes “technology idles below the window …” Travelling “sparked off more than once before …” Introductions Holidays Interior : Morning Ronny’s Friend “each day is necessary and sustains …” Today Backwards (1977) Foxtrot Marathon “sitting here how do they know where …” “a sense of strain between times is outlandish …” “fortunately there is a method, you suppose …” “the sky suggests the sundry forces …” “how restless they are …” “the hush that pervades …” “the swarthy ripples of her finger-tips …” “does the idea of language leave an impression …” “a tight lipped aurora …” “then it seemed that all our efforts led back …” “this evening I am entertained by a blackbird …” Battledore & Shuttlecock “lost oddments provoke moments of doubt …” “there is enough for us all …” Today Backwards Fading into Brilliance (1978) Fading Into Brilliance The Adventure The Spring-Loaded Cash Drawer Getting Through The Door Static Journey An Adventurous Episode Rejected By Boys Own Paper Nothing Is Abstract The Strategy Risks Second Chance Examining The Earthworks Never Let It End The Last Pages Hotel Zingo (1981) Debate “Unable to ignore …” The News “Mist loiters throughout the afternoon …” Sitting on the Sidelines “the bowl of marigolds on the cabinet …” “Who remains to recall such afternoons …” “the surrounding area prepares itself …” Incredible Vistas Sun House Propaganda The Preparations “All the alternatives unite and place their complex proposal …” Exercise for One Leg Occupying Absence January Deliberate Modulations Personal Choice “There is no prior indication …” Cold Front Vital Matters Theory Bulletin Best Foot Mixed Feelings Just Deserts Mooning Recipe Shorts Garden Incredible Vistas 2 Now and Then Airs and Graces So What! Inspiration is Just a Guy Called Art “If you do …” Light Testing Testing Testing Talking Air Hotel Zingo Pact and Impact “The evening is falling away sharply …” Common Denominator Here Today Here Tomorrow Flying Post Script Trans (1989) Address Double Take 1 Double Take 2 Trans Revisions Playback Rain Heroic and Hatless Right to Reply Alias Viewpoint N.B. Shadow Boxing A Perfect Language Four Songs Caption Block Rural Pursuits Stepping Out Mutant Generation Song 5 (out of sequence) Song 6 For the Record LCD Ode Par Avion As It Is Varations on Silence and Figures in a Room Ferrying Warnings Tongues of Light The Edge (1993) Foreword “Motive connects proposition …” “Comparisons and similarities …” “Constant terrestrial adoration …” “Trodden earth resists the heel of penury …” “Tell me no name bequeath no toil …” “Subliminal desires exploit …” “Art probe annuls waste …” “At the time of your departure …” “Echoes vibrate through frowsy evening light …” “Energy defined by the excess it harbours …” “You were alone in your room …” “As much about not retelling …” “Random probes dispatched to aimless wandering …” “Though dead and lost …” “Sometimes music too is inadequate …” “Many ways and many other ways …” “Wherever you settle contradicts …” “How you describe how it was then… .” Coda Art for Others (1998) Art for Others Delight’s Wreckage (2001) Shining Channels Shoal Interval Dead Letter Drop Shift Revisionary The Excommunicant Recoil Invisible Detachments Where Once Was Further Instructions Moves Interrogation Thomas’s Splint A Rant Ritual Passages passages camouflage findings masque ancient wishes Variations ancient wishes 2 fragment incidental variations break at warren street echo deep pile Elsewhere in Disguise commercial break sub-tropical garden airing no name song fragment Marking the Blue for naming ruse repair chronicle Delight’s Wreckage nocturne excursion fable damage field cause
Jets cruise in blank air Still as ice. Drawing thin white Fading white broken White lines On clear brilliant twilight. The perfect written language. The perfect language Of alien territory, Dramatic and immense. The eerie presence of a cry In that perfect language. A human cry in blank air. In the fading language of the day, The immense stillness of the sky, The thin disintegrating broken lines. The perfect alien language of the cry. The perfect, the alien cry.
Unpublished endorsement : I think of David Chaloner as a poet of the real mainstream, steering well clear of all the marginal temptations from language-fixated monopolism to the dull chatter of cheap success. A poetry which draws its discourse from the central history of poetry in English by being an ever-new thing, the script of here and now by its very freshness, its constant and calm searching among vocabularies, and the authenticity of its meditations through and beyond the personal, image and abstract at play and in serious converse.
And always truth. Truth Like morning hauled from darkness.
Peter Riley
Unpublished endorsement : This ingathering of work published over four decades comes none too soon and there’s not a page out of place. The section of uncollected early poems is a bonus. Chaloner’s long-term readers will need no reminder of his variousness and power to astonish; both they and those for whom this collection makes the earlier books available for the first time will be struck as well by the work’s core consistency manifested as an independent sensibility with the authority to take (or sometimes leave) the world on terms its own. Here then the everyday is not a simulacrum to be deplored since it is always already seen otherwise so that, in all their nonchalance and panache, these poems though sometimes dark remain unembittered. They present us with an unfamiliar world which may be ours and very likely is, and that’s their challenge.
Andrew Crozier
Review quote: Chaloner's Collected, generously stocked as it is with love poems, family memoirs, occasional pieces and travel poems, contains more ‘doors and windows’ (to use Andrew Duncan’s phrase) than much experimental poetry. But this letting of the world into the work generates a surface tension which sharpens the edges of these elegant, moving, funny poems.
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