Antony Rowland

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Biographical note:  Antony Rowland was born in Bradford in 1970. Since studying at Hull and Leeds he has taught literature and creative writing at The University of Salford. He has published poems in various journals and magazines, including Critical Quarterly, Stand and P.N. Review. A selection of his work appeared in New Poetries III (Carcanet, 2002). He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2000, and a Learning Northwest Award in 2001.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714001
ISBN:  9781844714001
Author:  Antony Rowland
Title:  The Land of Green Ginger
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-08
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:  The work in this collection occupies the exciting middle ground between mainstream and avant-garde poetry. It pushes the monologue form further than it’s ever been before, featuring the history of the beard recounted to a headless cavalier, a sibyl doomed to hairdressing in perpetuity, and an academic obsessed with the power of nineteenth-century barnets. The collection also contains a gastronomic edge, with a eulogy to the pie, an incident from World War One recounted through a tansy-cake, a diatribe against cucumbers, and an elegy for Pontefract’s pomfret cakes. A series of poems engages with the writer’s northern background, but without a flat cap or a greasy whippet in sight.

Table of contents:
Engrish
Pie
A History of the Beard
The Italian Bob
Engrish
Kwak
Lekke-Bekke
Damrak
Croky
Vienna
Scallops
The Cake
Charlie and Sassoon
The Long Cyclops
Cucumber
Cwm
Ox
Rain-pie
The Flies’ Cemetery
1926
Ganton Mount
Mistle from 1900
Pomfret
Cromwell’s Toothbrush
Primigravida
Polly
The Land of Green Ginger
Cech Speaks
Golem
Terezin
Rowland on the Hair
Lesvos
Skala Eressou
Bogue
Io
Gently Michael
Chestnut Avenue
Tongue and Udder
Moose
Press-ganged
R.A.F. Mapless
I.M. Deltics, 1977-81
London Particular
Suffrage

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Excerpt from book:  

Cromwell’s Toothbrush

Politics has powdered down to mulletgate,
the Low Sunday in Hay, Haie, Y-Gelli, ‘Grove’
of jumbo eggs and oven-ready geese.
Pages of verdigris await our baited eyes
above the moat of road. We plunder
the patchouli rooms, obscure sooterkins
of second-hand bookshops, slim volumes
selling like lukecakes. Biographies are snapped;
whereas, up in the alcoves, History moulds.
Long-lost novels greet us like lovers, just out of reach.

Touch the spines of the Wildlife section:
Crepidula fornicata, the clothes of the slipper
limpet and mitten crabs; saury — a long-beaked fish
from sauros, the horse-mackerel. See the moya,
the volcanic mud in the Geography section;
moulins, the fissures in glaciers; the metempsychosis
of squirrels?;?our blackthorn winter,
when blossom freezes on the branches of March.

We are neonates in this place with wrong questions on our lips:
Is Cromwell’s toothbrush before Worcester historical or not?
The hunch of backs is a Rump Parliament in the snug
as we clap our eye-beams on gammon in The Lion,
mock-Commonwealth candles and goode beer,
which is good and converts me to a one-pint screamer.
These Landlords are the prayer books of our gossipy age:
we are party to the fact that a jill is a ferret, not a measure,
from a man who looks like my father,
whose eloquence with wood embarrasses
my inarticulacy with banisters; tyres with kerb rash.
His eye is a spirit level and it accuses.


I pretend to listen to a carpet which croons behind a settee,
turns into a rather persuasive collie.
The piped musak is the will to content the people,
given up long ago for mobile phones.
We earwig those who come in with the milk bottles,
kettled, trollied, mullered, muppets who were clangered
with mutts, mucky ducks and swamp donkeys.

In the same plot of sky:
the vatic sun, the inviolable moon.
We luff our silhouettes from the avenue of eggs,
our thoughts leaving for our murine kitchen at home:
its furry secret beats under the fridge.
As Oestre’s hares pick the hills,
we quit The Lion with its eyes on the walls,
shadowed by Offa, Wye and its dykes,
the gentle rays of Hay fleeing our lids.

Unpublished endorsement :  Rowland is unafraid to use both language itself, and his observations of life generally, in unexpected new ways. He sets a strong group of poems in Eastern Europe, with some notable nuances; and there's often an intriguing obsession with food, which can make objective correlatives for anything from Fascism down to life's most local details. The poetry's texture recalls John Ashbery, and maybe originally Ezra Pound, both uniquely exciting originators.

John Powell Ward

Unpublished endorsement :  Poems such as ‘A History of the Beard’, ‘Damrak’ and ‘Kwak’ are adventurous: they really push the boat out and make me sit up and take notice. The poems are fascinating and make me want to read and re-read. ‘Scallops’ and ‘The Cake’ are a whole new take on ‘war poetry’. They are significant and powerful.

Jeffrey Wainwright