Vincent De Souza

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Biographical note:  Vincent De Souza studied English and Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and worked for several years as an advertising copywriter. His interest in motorcycles lead him on a number of road journeys, culminating in a ten country tour starting in Norway and leading into southern Europe. His work has been widely published in the UK poetry press and he has won 8 awards, 2 in high profile poetry competitions.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713325
ISBN:  9781844713325
Author:  Vincent De Souza
Title:  Weightless Road
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:  5 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:  Weightless Road is Vincent De Souza’s much anticipated first collection of poems – several of which have won awards in high profile poetry competitions, including fourth place in the London Writers Competition 2003 judged by the Bloodaxe poets Moniza Alvi and Jo Shapcott with the poem Breathing Defect.

This collection charts the growth of Vincent’s style – from early days when he was reading American writers like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and welcoming their influence on his poems. Earlier on his favoured subjects included motorcycles and road movie journeys, childhood trauma and snapshots of life often written with the detail of a photo image. Poems like Existence of Paint, Equal Rights Talk, the Lost Biker and the title piece, Weightless Road, carry the reader into the riding thrills of the motorcycle journeyman – you can smell the engine oil, feel the heat of the crankcase and the voice is a raw, clear one, of a writer surfing acceleration, aiming for a destination tantalisingly out of sight.

Over time his style branches out as his study of painters like Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí see him take more risks with the language and methods of the poems. Vincent’s eye is a camera ready to allow any subject to emerge centre stage in a poem. From the brutality of macho loveless sex in Bloodstains to the anarchic urban violence and vandalism in Kicking Cars. Places and people in the poems are real and unedited, yet the language and imagery raise them into symbols of something bigger, a deeper truth. Cityscapes and the urban face of London are backdrops to the energy in many poems and Vincent’s love of rock music surfaces in the Nirvana tribute of Shooting on a Moment and the Jimi Hendrix portrait of Home is Fire.

If poems were home entertainment, Vincent’s are adrenalin-fuelled Play Station games, if poems were musical instruments, Vincent’s are a Stratocaster electric guitar and if poems were cries from the human soul, Vincent’s are a rebel yell.

Table of contents:
Against Adam
Existence of Paint
Equal Rights Talk, the Lost Biker
Towards the Abattoir
Slave to the Mistral
Getting it From the Mirror
Wash the Cadillac
On the Move with Medusa
Ocean Wolves
My Discipline Beach
Shooting on a Moment
Breathing Defect
Place of Forgiveness Somewhere in a Child
Doll's Cannibal Friend
Softness and Fever
Various Angels
Lost Shopping List
Planned Out-Takes
Hideaway
Tigers
Devil's Wood
Reindeer Death Threat
Flight of the Fall
Nevada, There
Ghosting of Her Love
Weightless Road
Kicking Cars
Presence of Locki
Rings Surviving at Rest
Sol Sun, Mijas Rain
Meaning Silence
Heroine of the Butterfly Effect
Prayer for Ray-Bans
Lightness of Death
Syntax Breakdown Saying Name's Name
Damning the Sea
Stateside Current
Tears Return in Blue
Row Boat to a Self
Shaper's Remorse
Yours Faithfully, Sincerely
Language Line
Colonel Lucifer and Agent Hades
Alive
Good Old Churches
Crystal Rafters
Reincarnation Gossip in the Salon of Spirituality
Heights
Sugar Mountains
Derelict
Rural Double Bind
Sunset Tang
Bloodstains on Sheets, Carpets, Shower, Basin etc. and Layers of Emotional Paint in the Mind and a White-on-white Wedding Dress Packed Away in a Clear Plastic Zip Bag Under the Bed .?.?.
Birthday Assassins
Demons Walk from Love
Goliath and Goliath and Goliath
Genet Greeting
X Number of Smiles
Rough diamond
Aftermath of a Mountainous Decision that Wasn't Made at a Watershed He Intuited as a Plain
Gunfire of a Coward
Throw it Away
Home is Fire

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Excerpt from book:  

Breathing Defect

Yeah, it never completely dies,
for any intake, speech or sigh,
pylon, hummingbird, storm rumble,
dumbed-down in the core of sleep,
full weight when I force the speed —
want to hear it, want the noise,
a rough recording, sound on vision?

It goes around playing its filthy rhythm,
listen, I wasn’t born with this thumping,
my painless sheet music, soured drums,
I didn’t ask him to do that thing,
you know I liked what I had on;
need me to strum out the blanks,
scrawl the song, hum its unfailing white?

Fears to mention, dust and broken glass,
strip the melody jabbed in my skin,
disbelief, silence blown in the lungs,
you can stick a coin inside my slot,
I work, you know, with moving parts;
lay a finger, an audience on my chest,
get a load of tremors — be still, enjoy.

Unpublished endorsement :  On a first reading of de Souza’s exciting new collection I was swept away by sensation – sex, violence, crime and death are all rendered in gutsy language that doesn't have much time for musing or digression. These poems are hot-wired into the bloody almost pagan instincts beneath our civilized skin. But there is tenderness here too, in his examination of our physical and emotional frailties, coupled with a quest to move through the body into spirit and vision. Thrill-seeking and thoughtful: a difficult combination to pull off, but one that de Souza does, like his speeding motorcyclist, in style.

Esther Morgan

Unpublished endorsement :  Vincent de Souza’s Weightless Road has been a long time coming but it is worth its wait in gold, for this book is marvellously written, beautifully wrought and scrupulously chosen; and in poems such as ‘Place of Forgiveness Somewhere in a Child’ and ‘Tears Return in Blue’ the poet achieves a tone which is as heart-rendingly perceptive as it is consoling and redemptive.

David Morley