The Unhaunting

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Andrew Taylor The Unhaunting
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Andrew Taylor was born in Australia in 1940. He is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry, the libretti of two operas, and translations from German and Italian. His poetry has won several prizes, and reflects his extensive travel. He has taught at universities in Australia, Germany and China, and lived in the UK, USA, Italy and Germany. His most recent publications are Collected poems (2004) and The Unhaunting (2009), both from Salt Publishing. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844713486 ISBN: 9781844713486 Author: Andrew Taylor Title: The Unhaunting Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 25-Jun-09 Extent: 112pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 8 mm Weight: 168 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: NP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World	See larger image PAPERBACK / SOFTBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£9.99~~ £7.99	Short description/annotation: The unhaunting has great variety of tone, preoccupation, style and form, ranging across countries and situations with an ear for the music of language and the harmonies and dissonances of human experience. Taylor’s Collected Poems showed him as a poet of ceaseless experiment and continual relevance, and this new collection reinforces his reputation as both a consolidator and innovator. Main description: The unhaunting is Taylor’s first collection of poems since his Collected poems was published by Salt in 2004, and ranges widely, in geography, mood, thematic preoccupations and style. The book’s title is also that of a poem concerned with how places can be haunted by people even while alive, and whose death provides a kind of exorcism and psychological healing. The poet’s own experience of severe illness from cancer in 2003 enables him to see death not as something to be feared and abhorred, but as an opportunity for reconciliation and love. However most of this book is much lighter in tone, reflecting the poet’s own sensitivity to the infinite variety of experience. A visit to Falmouth, time teaching in Shanghai, the funeral of his wife’s mother in Germany, cooling one’s heels in Paris, a visit to pristine forest in the south of Western Australia, all find a place here. Also clearly evident is a concern for the health of the environment, and a deep love of Australian nature and Australia’s land- and riverscape. The poet’s love of music is not only reflected in a sequence explicitly about it, but also in his play with rhythms and sound echoes, and in the use frequently made of them to structure poems and sequences, almost – but not quite – in defiance of meaning. The language is lucid but tantalising, fully aware of current experiment but not surrendering its own distinctiveness of it. The book also contains a number of translations of poems by the Italian Nobel Laureate, Eugenio Montale, for whose poetry Taylor feels a distinct affinity. Table of contents: The importance of waiting Night by night Waiting Keeping the pool clean Reborn I move a bit When the white stuff Cliffs Sand dollars Family reunion Enigma The simple truth Metamorphoses?:?The Pinnacles, WA Maybe one morning .?.?. Maybe one morning To loiter Bagni di Lucca Dora Markus The dead The coastguards’ house Punta del Mesca The eel Little testament Lights and colours The carillon clock The vanishing The vanishing at Falmouth Passing time in Paris Rain Quantum morning Movement The Picture of Little T.H. in a Prospect of Disaster Sleuth and lynx Unhaunting Shanghai high-rise Dust Roadworks, Shanghai Rain near Hangzhou Shanghai thankyou Driving to the airport Dinner by the river Friedhoefe The unhaunting Birkenschnee North South Diesel The black tigers The impossible poem Surf Kite flying, car driving Where do the dolls go?? For music Charades The impossible poem View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (76 KB) Excerpt from book: The coastguards’ house You don’t remember the coastguards’ house on the crag that juts over the reef. Deserted, it’s been waiting for you ever since that evening your thoughts swarmed in and hovered there, restless. For years the sea wind has lashed its walls and your laughter no longer sounds happy: the compass drifts crazily the roll of the dice no longer adds up. You don’t remember: some other weather troubles your memory. But a thread unravelled. I hold an end of it, though the house drifts back the smoke-stained weathercock perched on the roof spins without mercy. I hold an end of it still; but you’re alone not here, not breathing in this darkness. Oh, that vanishing horizon, where the lights of a passing tanker shine so rarely! Is that where the passage lies? (Surf hurls itself endlessly at the crumbling cliff …) You don’t remember this house nor my night here. And I don’t know who leaves or who stays. Previous review quote: Taylor’s poems are included in many anthologies and stitched into the tapestry of Australian poetry like subtle, burnished threads. They show a cool intelligence that is modest, tolerant: caught in moments of utterance, searching for and playing with significance and attuned to their own provisionality. The ‘voice’ is speculative, emotional, formally inventive, but international and regional. David Gilbey Australian Book Review Previous review quote: Andrew Taylor… has been working away consistently over thirty-five years to produce an enormously impressive body of work….It is a book that will live with me for months and years to come. Every time I open it, I find new pleasures. Taylor is a quiet poet, fastidious and precise, but this does not preclude a wide tonal variety and the deployment of a keen intelligence and wit in poetry that dazzles with its formal variety. The breadth of subject matter is astonishing. It is, of course, impossible to illustrate the richness of this book via one poem. Suffice to say that here is a massive contribution to the cultural hoard. Adrian Caesar Westerly Previous review quote: Writing has never been static for Taylor – a true innovator, he has combined formal control (astonishingly in place right from his very first book, The Cool Change, published in 1971), with the need for formal dexterity generated by the need to move, to reassess all ideas that cross his broad scope. … [Swamp Poems] are clearly spiritual poems that retain their critical edge, their empirical analysis of materiality. Imagistic and contemplative, the eye of the observer is both witness and participant – is removed from the scene as observer, but directly implicated as part of a greater whole. These are poems of terror and beauty, but subtly woven into a space where “nature” and the “constructed” fuse and morph. They are small journey poems that open large vistas. John Kinsella Ars Interpres Previous review quote: Taylor’s sharpest poems mark out landscapes with the precision of a mysterious photograph. Barry Hill The Weekend Australian