Sandra Tappenden

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Sandra Tappenden was born in Kent. Previously a Creative Writing tutor for Exeter College, and MIND, she also gigged with an experimental/improvisational multi-media collective who once, but memorably, managed to empty the Drewe Arms Jazz Club. Her work has been published consistently in poetry magazines over a period of fifteen years. Her first collection was ‘Bags of Mostly Water’ (2003). She now lives in Plymouth.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713103
ISBN:  9781844713103
Author:  Sandra Tappenden
Title:  Speed
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-07
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 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:  When action is everything and thoughts little more than waste product, it’s hard to justify time spent revelling in thinking for it’s own sake… The poems in this collection do, however, revel, and attempt to celebrate reflection and the ability to question, even if it’s often at a peculiarly guilt-ridden breakneck pace. The World, according to this poet, is moving too fast, and experiences gather meaning piecemeal, according to the time allowed or allotted. ‘Speed’ is a jerky ride passing through familiar states; love, rage, boredom and joy, all expressed in a gauche yet testy manner, which is equally playful and exhausted.

Whether out of breath or seemingly interrupted, these poems are racing to keep up with time, which is up at the front and evidently winning. They hang on to a healthy sense of the absurd, even when dealing with loss, or perhaps because of it. The tone of the poems is deceptively simple, at times almost idiotic or banal, playing with ideas of ‘poetry’ in a knowing way, with nods and winks to literary theory, whilst never actually becoming partisan. The concerns tackled are ‘of the world’; rarely overtly political, more frequently engagingly individualised, but always relevant, surprising, and inclusive.

It’s been suggested that every era of major social change brings with it a new malaise; adapting to the speed of 21st century living has brought with it an epidemic of constant tiredness and stress. ‘Speed’, if not exactly a manifesto, is a certain sign of the times.

Table of contents:
Promise
Shame
Speed
Mastery
Blame
Ease
Dirt
from Half
Options UK
St Swithin’s Day
The G** Spot
The bookcase of the wood of the beauty red
A Heirarchy of Bold Type
Five Cinquains
The Climate of the Hypothalamus
Matthew Arnold Refuses To Exit the Building
Due Care
Idiot in truth uniform
Lipsmackin’ Ashes
Pretty Junk
Honestly
People Moulded Out of Air
People who are drawn to take free stress tests
People who charm your pants off need more love
People who infer via mass media (Live 8)
People with a Point to Prove
Addiction
Bells
Ethos
The Meaning of Life
The Hard Problem
There must be something in the water
children were us
Two Days Off
Windfall the stars say
are bananas still fabulous
Waroirrs of the Whiled West
Femmes de Ville
The unexamined life is not worth living
Vision

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample ( KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Shame

Muses are not ten a penny. They cost
lots, like selling your self-respect
down the river, like a boot-trader
trading from a unmoored barge
on a greasy Sunday where the sun
is held overhead in a dirty bag
like an old pasty. It ought to be
brighter than this. It probably is

in that world where the Muses live
as if they were just people
with nervous tics and dirty socks
instead of bringers of loveliness
or destroyers in understated casuals.
If only I could stop with the
pedestal nonsense; your average Muse
is tone-deaf and crap at balancing.

O Don, you said choose someone
who hates you, and I did, several times
and totally, but now you have lost your hair
the trust has gone, and I’m alone again
with the shame of wanting anything
to turn out better than wrong;
with a history of ridicule and this
priceless marble column.

Unpublished endorsement :  Delightfully digressive, investigative, confessional and clever. Her words hit the page and run in unlikely and rewarding directions that don't seem inevitable even with hindsight. Sometimes they sound like formally framed sparks spinning off a Catherine wheel of consciousness, the distilled digressions of a chatty contemplative. She has a light touch with dark humour, and smuggles in images that make you stop your trolley mid-aisle and re-examine your purchases. I like these poems. I recommend them.

Matt Harvey

Unpublished endorsement :  These poems crackle and pop and can’t stop — they don’t seem to quite know where they are going but that’s why I love them — it makes them curiously irresistible; it’s like a night out, unreliable, celebratory — or would be celebratory if the poems weren’t so canny. Right from the start, from the content’s yummy titles, from the thrill of the first line — “I’ve found it helps to carry an egg in my pocket” — so enticing, so obstinate and mysterious, the reader can’t wait to read on — (Read on? A book of poems? How rare is that?) Here we find horses fed on hearts, the possibility of being buried in cake, arrows fired (or not) from bedroom windows — fizzy one-liners, dippy references, whacky cinquains.

Selima Hill

Unpublished endorsement :  A dizzingly inventive and persuasively tough and idiosyncratic collection.

Selima Hill

Previous review quote:  … a book of manic sanity.

Mike Baldwin
Stride