Chris McCabe

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Biographical note:  Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry has featured in a number of magazines including ‘Magma’ and ‘Poetry Review’ and his first collection The Hutton Inquiry was published in 2005. He has discussed and read his poetry on BBC World Service and featured a poem on the Oxfam CD Lifelines. He currently works as a Joint Librarian of the Poetry Library, London.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714384
ISBN:  9781844714384
Author:  Chris McCabe
Title:  Zeppelins
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-08
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  With grit and humour Zeppelins takes on the speed and surrealist chaos of the metropolis at the beginning of the 21st century. A sequence of sonnets oscillates between two very different cities: a London at the centre of a terrorist scare and a Liverpool enjoying its renaissance as European City of Culture. Both cities are probed as places faced with challenges as well as centres to be celebrated. The title poem ‘Zeppelins’ uses the bombings of London in the First World War to reflect another use of manmade machines to inflict violence on civilians: the London underground bombings of July 2005. The day of the bombings itself is captured in the poem ‘Axis is’ whilst related afflictions carried out by the government on the other side of the Atlantic is tackled in ‘Abu Ghraib’.

Counterbalanced to this are private poems of love, proposal and marriage. The book begins with ‘A Proposal’ and through a marriage diary written in Barcelona, ends with an attempt to position the new and unique poem in the history of ‘The Great Sprawling Love Poem’.

Urban, inquisitive and with a restless interest in the now McCabe writes about BNP Dagenham, Pete Doherty’s arrests and the Essex reaction to England’s exit from the World Cup in 2006. Playful and serious, with an eye for the strange and comedic, this is a book about what it means to be alive in a city as we head towards the second decade of the 21st century.

Table of contents:
A Proposal
The Mananger
101 Differences Between Poetry and Popular Music
Poem
The Nuptials
Axis is
Abu Ghraib
The Property Ladder
Existential Clubbing
Ebore
No Hawkers
Prac Crit (A Confessional Poem)
Poems Overheard
Stetson's Book of Days
The Pete Doherty in Prison Poem
The Father Nut
Letter to Apollinaire Written in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery
Manual
The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express
Seven Perspectives
A 98p Voicemail Message to Blaise Cendrars
Headliners
BNP Podcasts
The Essex Fox
A Diary Entry
The Union-Business Negotiation School
Radio
Leda and the Swan
Shoreditch Solutions
Letter to Lorca from Costa Brava
Lifelong Learning
Sunken Lane
Amsterdam
Good Friday
Poem in Black Ink
Zeppelins
The Great Sprawling Love Poem

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Excerpt from book:  

The Pete Doherty in Prison Poem

Eyes panda-blacked from a ten year boozecruise.
Shelled & contused—which is done-in to you.

One clean day back when, took a picnic to a park in a place
called Tuebrook & etched immortal Doherty into the bark.

No protests to your latest arrest, caught in the chunk-
cheeked duck walk from Dalston to Shoreditch.

New media of mad nerd dementia. They need you
less than this post-vampyric need not to need them.

On the inside it’s all stewing beef & pig kidney,
diced ox-heart with milk instead of cereal.

To miss the oaty warmth of Mother Time.
The dinner warden said he’s got some reduced fish

for lunch, you said that must be tadpole soup
and not one stern face in the queue laughed or lapped it up.

You could blag your blogspot & still no one would care
who you were, bar the one you said you love who stares

from their brick walls on a catwalk to catcalls & dogsnarls.
This diary you’ve done no less urgent than Gramsci’s

if more flippant—as you would say—mostly pants from flap-to-flap.
You can flick back to what you’ve done then wrap it up.

Head shilly-shallies like a shambolic bambino. Tomorrow,
back to some onion argie-bargie along Brick Lane

then gigs in Glasgow. Total stretch: thirteen days.

Previous review quote:  At 158 pages, Chris McCabe's debut is shorter than Hutton's original report, but still an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century. McCabe writes with the lower-case lightness of Tom Raworth and the northern comic realism of Simon Armitage. One key poem begins "we call a spade / a fucking spade".

The wide variety of lyricism here is distributed under five headed sections. The least successful of these is the title sequence, where public language has already been so badly manipulated that verse is reduced to the role of outraged chiropractor. But the whole book zooms by sparking with spot-on phrases: "onanism of fire", "car disappears in the ear", "red indians know our evil instinctively".

Jeremy Noel-Tod
The Guardian

Previous review quote:  I also admire Chris McCabe's many-edged snaps of society and politics and Daljit Nagra's mordant monologues and syntactical experiments. All of these poets seem influenced by work outside of the mainstream, yet none will be satisfied ploughing the rainy margins.

Roddy Lumsden
Magma

Previous review quote:  It's common coin among poets (American and British) to initiate or react to complaints of a lack of fresh talent. Where are the Allen Ginsbergs, people say, (or the Corsos or the O'Haras), where are the young poets that aren't merely out to impress their teachers? The emergence of Chris McCabe on the UK (and hopefully, soon, international) stage heralds the arrival of a significant voice, one that isn't afraid to be young, express "young" virtues— spontaneity, nerve, daring, humor (both coarse and refined), all balanced with an unflinching precision that validates the whole package. The younger batch of American poets (Kirsch, Goodyear, Gordon)simply can't compete.

Not that McCabe is unsophisticated. On the contrary, McCabe is an urban poet with a keen awareness of history, and capable of a remarkably contemporary-feeling (and politicized) pathos. He's a lyricist whose limber use of free verse invites comparison to the best writing of the New York School or the Black Mountain poets. Moreover, McCabe's willingness to work with conceptual elements links him securely to the post-modern tradition. His "Progress Poems" demonstrate a facility for glib-seeming but dead-on irony, putting our humanist notions of psycho-spiritual progress on the spit for a thorough (and hilarious) grilling.

Adam Fieled
P.F.S. Post

Previous review quote:  I saw Chris McCabe read in Cambridge one cold night, liked what I heard, and am pleased those poems are now in a more permanent medium than my auditory memory.

Tom Raworth

Previous review quote:  How great to find a poet who has the receptiveness to take in all the details of the urban world and who also has the energy to challenge that world and demand change.

Tom Raworth

Previous review quote:  There is a shortage of political poets in the UK, and of funny poets, and of vital performers and poets who fascinate as well as innovate. Chris McCabe lessens all these deficits.

Roddy Lumsden