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Biographical note:  Andy Brown is Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at Exeter University. His recent books include Hunting the Kinnayas (Stride, 2004), From a Cliff (Arc, 2002) and of Science (Worple, 2001, with David Morley). He edited The Allotment: new lyric poets (Stride, 2006) and Binary Myths: Volumes 1 & 2 (2nd edition, Stride, 2004). He writes short fiction and is also co-writing a book of poems with John Burnside. Andy Brown studied Ecology, a discipline that informs both his poetry and his criticism, which appears in The Salt Companion to the Works of Lee Harwood (Salt, 2006). He was previously a Centre Director for the Arvon Foundation’s creative writing courses, and has been a recording musician.

Biographical note:  John Burnside was born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712847
ISBN:  9781844712847
Author:  Andy Brown
Title:  Goose Music
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  06-Aug-08
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  216 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:  Goose Music is a collection of new poems co-authored by Andy Brown and John Burnside, two writers with backgrounds in ecology and notable for their lyric poetry. John Burnside won the Whitbread Prize for poetry in 2000. Characterised by their formal variety, lyric intensity and their attention to natural detail, the poems in Goose Music are Ecopoetic, asking questions of how we might dwell on the earth in these times of great environmental change, exploring lyric ideas of identity, self, myth, landscape and place.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Part One
Goose Music
Some Notes on a Theory of Emergence
Nature Corner
Atavism
Insomnia
The Other Garden
Ganders in the Gardens
A Horse’s Skull
On Hollow Moor
Eleven Gift Songs
Small Voices
Pine Trees at Five Ways
Los angeles mohosos
Three Enquiries Concerning Angels
The Ice Pool Under the Church Tower
Prayer
Prayer / Why I am Happy to be in the City this Spring
Castor / Pollux
Fiat Nox
Janus?—?Li Po Sonnets
Orange
Part Two
Two Essays on the Folk Story
The Breaking of Waves
Persephone
Eurydice
Mules at Ystradginlais
Narcissus (Einzelgaenger)
Part Three
Poems of the Father
The Blue Hour
The Promise of Home
Homage to Henri Bergson
The Other Brother
Towards a Book of Common Prayer
On the Road to the Eye Hospital
Dedications

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Excerpt from book:  

Three Enquiries Concerning Angels
after Paul Klee

i  GEIST DER SCHIFFER

The angels that come in the night
are thinnest
       and could be mistaken

for shadows,
       like the blackness in old coins
or scraps of dialect.

They slip through when no one is watching;
       sometimes they leave
handprints
       or a trail of talc and myrrh

but never enough
       to scare us
as these creatures of the day

who might even be what they seem
        — the greengrocer’s son,
the woman who cleans for the doctor —

these terrible, sweet
       faces at the window,
seemingly

indifferent,
       against the yellow light

touched by a sudden warmth
       like pieces of litmus,

everyday people
       with somewhere else to go:
street sweepers, schoolboys,
the fishmonger’s wife,

handling the things of the day
       but awake to the sky.

Unpublished endorsement :  To disappear within the hum of creation is every creator's fiercest longing. And to reappear, reincarnate, grinning for all of the apparent reasons! Such is the magic Brown and Burnside make in Goose Music.

Thomas Lynch

Review quote:  Mystery, luminosity and forgetting the maps – that thrilling space between sense data and faith.

Paul Farley