Michael Brennan

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Biographical note:  Michael Brennan was born in Sydney in 1973 and is currently a lecturer in the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Tokyo. His first collection, The Imageless World (Salt, 2003) was short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry and won the Mary Gilmore Award. In 2006, he undertook residencies in Berlin and Paris thanks to the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships, the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, and the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. He has published several books and collaborations, including Absence and Negativity in Australian Literature (editor, 2000), The Imageless World (2003), Language habits (2006), Sky was sky (with Akiko Muto, 2007), Atopia (with Kay Orchison, 2008), and Unanimous Night (2008). He is the Australian editor of www.poetryinternational.org and director of Vagabond Press.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713257
ISBN:  9781844713257
Author:  Michael Brennan
Title:  Unanimous Night
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-08
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  180 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:  Unanimous Night is the second full-length collection from Tokyo-based poet Michael Brennan. Unanimous Night is an elegy affirming experience, the depth and interconnectedness of each singular moment. Moving from the displacement and dislocation of his first award-winning collection The Imageless World, Brennan builds new paths into a dream-like and quietly hallucinatory experience of that world, wherein the experience of language is inseparable from the experience of being, where dream and daylight reality interweave, arriving through the erasure of the self. Meditative and celebratory, these poems come to praise this world without obscuring its violence, seeking out timelessness and stillness in the constant evolution of light and sensual experience, in the permanence of loss, the vastness of the elemental, the proximity of friendship, family and lovers, and the transitory beauty of each moment given in the senses. In these poems, love and experience reveal themselves not in the will to grasp and hold, to know and understand, to stabilize and secure, but as an opening of the self to the world that rushes through the brief eclipse of time in the sensual, the momentary and fragmentary, and the sometimes brutal, grip of memory. Recalling the work of Popa and Rilke, Unanimous Night is a love song, the recognition of an elsewhere that constantly evolves within and beyond the contemporary—its horrors and hatreds, its fragility, uncertain truths and knowing—a world of moments and presence, of love and communion, where language and being, the living and the dead, the natural and the technological, the instant and endless converge, where longing turns through healing to the intimacy of experience, of the ever-arriving and wholly present. Unanimous Night is an approach to the space where language and experience coalesce, where subjectivity gives way to the shared experiences of love, mourning and desire, where being offers itself to the violence and grace of another, to an intimacy where being is being shared.

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Excerpt from book:  

Now

We spent years seeding
forgetting and love.
We waited.
We watched

flowers appear where he lay,
tending them each year.
We buried others nearby,
chose our own places,

named there carefully,
built from words we had
only silence for,
words he gave us.

I am watching the sky now,
where we bury everything,
listening for his voice
of stone and wood, of light

our bodies catch for a moment
and take deep into ground.
It is growing inside each of us,
a room, a house, a body

rising up in tears and words.
We are moving now, moving
again, carrying each other
into nameless places.

Unpublished endorsement :  One of those rare books that is at the same time both dazzlingly taut and searingly tender. It is structurally watertight in the most admirable way, every screw in place, and yet infused with a deep grace and fluidity: nothing brittle or thin in this fine and unusual book. Brennan explores loss and memory, mourning and Time, with an unflinching eye for the emotionally open moment. A heart-wrenching work that genuinely engages the reader at one's core. A book that can, and will, be read many times over.

Luke Davies

Unpublished endorsement :  Like any poet, Brennan is most at home with absence, loss, and separation. And like good poets, he knows how to discover in them, for us, vivid glints of momentary presence – so that we feel healed by that from which we are most estranged.

Charlotte Mandell

Unpublished endorsement :  Michael Brennan is one of the most original voices in Australian poetry today.

Vivian Smith