Another Place

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Mike Barlow Another Place
Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Mike Barlow’s first collection ‘Living on the Difference’ won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2003 and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection. He has won prizes in a number of competitions, including first prize in the National Poetry Competition 2006, the Ledbury Competition 2005 and the Amnesty International Competition 2002. He is also a visual artist, making drawings, paintings and assemblages of found materials. He lives near Lancaster. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844713974 ISBN: 9781844713974 Author: Mike Barlow Title: Another Place Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Oct-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: IP Price: GBP 8.99 Price: USD 14.99 Rights: World	See larger image PAPERBACK BUY DIRECT 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£8.99~~ £7.19 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$14.99~~ $11.99	Short description/annotation: Poems that focus on the alternative currents of thought, emotion and possibility that underlie the everyday, the sense there is always somewhere or someone else on the other side of the present experience. This is an imagined reality which carries a sense of edginess, unease, transience. Main description: This book is about other places, whether physical or psychological, which the mind can occupy alongside the everyday. Barlow is concerned with the otherness of experienced reality, a sense there is always somewhere or someone else on the other side of the present, ‘a life I’ve not lead/ waiting to lead me home’. These poems combine various degrees of fiction, biography and autobiography and are triggered by a range of sources — from personal experience to newspaper articles, from modern novels and artworks to the voyages of Captain Cook, from the rural Lancashire environment where Barlow lives to the Shetland Islands. Although usually drawing from some reported or directly experienced reality, whether or not he sets out to do so, Barlow inevitably finds himself addressing the current of thoughts and emotions that underlie daily events — the undertow, as it were – a sense of unease, edginess and transience. Sometimes playful, occasionally lyrical, often unnerving, the poems work off one another to create a sense of a world less certain than it at first seems, ‘another place’ within everyday reality. Table of contents: Aubade June Bug The Illustrator Two Poems after William Maxwell Evening Wind Another Place Choosing the Moment House of Winds Butterfly The Boat in My Brain Someone Else South Westerly Decoy The Ball Likenesses The Sparkle in the Arctic Sky Quviannikumut A Night Out Egg-finder Sometime in June Split-seconds Hot Pursuit The Old Faith Versions of Heaven Listening To It The Man She Lives With Something Between Us The Third Wife The Seven Days of Unst Inside the Light Prima Donna A Hunger Transit of Venus The Real Dr Who Mapmakers Journey for Two Voices My Neighbour Fireproof Confabulate Real Life Lament Played on an Umbrella Putting Your Finger On It The Barbs in Wire Unspecified Crimes Learning Not to Read Reilly Frisking The Poem Unattended Exit Nocturne View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (452 KB) Excerpt from book: Another Place They could have come by boat. You can see there’s a channel through the rocks. They would have brought with them the timber they needed, nails, corrugated sheets and basic tools: saw, hammer, pick, spade. They would have put up the roof by the first night, first shelter, first title. There might have been rain driving in from the west, or it may have been warm and clear, like today, making everything feel right. Later, the hearth, its stone trimmed and hefted into place, some mortar, infill and the chimney grown by muscle and eye into the main prop, the one part that would last, a monument to forgotten labour on an empty coast. Early on they would have planted the rowan, perhaps a whip brought from another place, and the holly, to ward off evil. And here are roses gone wild among the rusty iron and rotting creels. Tall blue flowers that don’t belong in these parts are signs of a garden where cattle now wander and browse, leaving the poisonous flowers which, like the old iron bedstead propped inside, still anchor the place to a history. Otherwise, there are no ghosts here, only us, dreamers from away, picking about, reading signs. Us and our conjectures. Unpublished endorsement : There’s directness and lightness of touch, an often brilliant deftness, in Mike Barlow’s poems, and an unusual warmth – all of it underwritten by vivid detail which remind us that he’s also a visual artist. But what he sees is only partly why his poems are so compelling; there’s also the sense he has of ‘living in two worlds at once’. What he imagines is alive – vital and often dangerous. It is what makes this collection outstanding. Ann Sansom Unpublished endorsement : Mike Barlow’s poetry inhabits a world of parallel lives, lurking presences, odd dreams, a place that is constantly mysterious and surprising. Technically assured, full of details observed with an artist’s eye, these are poems with an edge, able to alter the way you see things. Elizabeth Burns Review quote: All the poems in ‘Another Place’ stem from an unusually cogent poetic imagination; the reader has entered the World Barlovian Michael Standen Other Poetry Review quote: "It's the gaps that matter," claims Mike Barlow, midway through this collection, "Wiring the blanks with real life / as if real life were there …" Whether he's climbing in high winds, reading about Captain Cook or birdwatching on Unst, Barlow's poems all grapple, in the end, with this question of "real life" — what it is, and what lies outside it. His attempts to bridge the gap between reality and the imagined world beyond see him reaching for telescopes, lenses, mirrors — anything that allows him to see the unseen. Sarah Crown The Guardian Previous review quote: Mike Barlow is a poet of relationships, intimate and neighbourly, a clear sharp eye and a steady gaze, keeping a look-out for us. Michael Laskey, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Previous review quote: … takes a slice of life and stares hard at the layers. And this is no mean feat — there are some enviable moments of bravura descriptive writing. Clive Allen Exultations and Difficulties Previous review quote: It’s always a relief to encounter a poet who acknowledges the limitations of the usual poetic party tricks and the illusion of control-through-certainty they offer. Acumen Previous review quote: As skilled, as practised and as appealing as a cyclist on a high-wire. Alan Dent Penniless Press Previous review quote: Free verse so weighed and paced it shows an elegance and care beyond any achieved by formal styles. Paul Sutherland Dreamcatcher