Tom Pow

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Biographical note:  Tom Pow has won three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards for his poetry and one for his children’s writing. He has also written a travel book and written radio dramas. From 2001 to 2003 he was the first writer in residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and in 2005 was Poet in Residence at StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival. He has taught in Edinburgh, London, Madrid and Dumfries. He teaches at Glasgow University, Crichton Campus in Dumfries, where he is a Senior Lecturer in creative writing and storytelling. In 2007, he received a Creative Scotland Award.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714162
ISBN:  9781844714162
Author:  Tom Pow
Title:  Dear Alice
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  14-Feb-08
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  144 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:  Tom Pow’s powerful new collection of poetry explores the imaginative legacy of a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, the Crichton, drawing on the richly-documented history of the site. This remarkable book includes the sequence ‘Resistances’ gathered from female patients’ notes, but Pow brings many others within his compass: Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Thumb, Peter Pan, Charcot (Master of Salpetriere, the female asylum in Paris, ‘that great emporium of human misery’), all make an appearance, as do Freud and the Wolf Man. The Crichton Lunatic Asylum was at the forefront of the great nineteenth century European-wide ‘trade in lunacy’ — a period when old assurances were crumbling and our modern sense of the permeability of identity was being formed.

Meet the author

Table of contents:
Prelude
Inauguration
Song for M
Nebuchadnezzar in the Arboretum by Moonlight
From Foucault: Two Tales and a Bedlam Ballad
1. Appetite
2. The Wise Farmer
3. Glass
Tom Thumb Visits the Crichton Institution for Lunatics
23 February 1845
Nightwatch, 1842
The Last Vision of Angus McKay
Field Notes
The Buoy-Tree
Tryst
Landfall
Charcot, Master of Salpetriere, Delivers his ‘Tuesday Lecture’ at the Crichton
August 1879
The Arch of Hysteria
Questions of Judgement
Deirdre
The Wolf Man at Crichton Hall, 1914
A Dream Before Battle
Service Patient, 1916
Dear Alice
Inmates
Nurses
Freud at the Crichton
September 1939
The Gardeners
Grass
1. The Weaver
2. The Iceman
3. Rashin-Coatie
Ex-Laundry Girl, 1943
The Ghost Pitch
Resistances
1. ‘each duty commands its own song’
2. ‘because you dig the garden’
3. ‘home has lost our touch’
4. ‘I watch’
5. ‘how many steps in any direction’
6. ‘you make a bargain with the world’
7. ‘to remain yourself deny yourself’
8. ‘lost soul there is a world’
coda
The Great Asylums of Scotland
Notes
Don Quixote

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Excerpt from book:  

The Buoy-Tree

Lochans of rain gathered
in the hollows, the trees
were dripping and bare.

On one, a gull landed,
spreading its wings like an angel.
It must have been a sign —

for angels are signs if nothing else.
Soon other gulls flocked there
till the whole tree was frocked

with them. Their wings beat
the water gently from them,
touching each other as you might

brush your arm against another
in a dance. It's a wonder
you never saw it that day,

it was all there was really to see —
a tree that seemed to writhe
with light, like a buoy

on a featureless sea.
But what drew the birds there,
or set them back in flight,

is just one more thing at which
to wonder. I can only think
it was the rain that kept you away.

Unpublished endorsement :  Out of fractured narratives of real pain, profound human distress and madness, as well as from records of the historic therapeutic quests of the Crichton doctors who tried — always inadequately, of course, how could it be otherwise? — to deal with, if not heal, this misery, Tom Pow has fashioned beautiful, humane, deeply mysterious poems imbued with a palpable sense of place, of landscape and of time.

Liz Lochhead

Review quote:  These are wonderfully lucid poems, full of humanity…Pow is regarded as one of Scotland's finest poets – and it shows in this brave collection.

Harry Mead
The Northern Echo

Review quote:  With taut economy, turns of phrase arresting and compelling and an ear for weighing words, Pow's variety and empathy with his material are laudable, lyrical things. This is a poignant, subtle and humane book.

Peggy Hughes
Scotland on Sunday

Review quote:  Pow is not constrained by the specialised material, including artworks and annual reports from the asylum. Rather, he combines this with his own fantasy narratives and contemporary observations…There is often a literal descriptive level at which these poems operate…but on the meta-level there is a text that raises far wider questions, many of them finding obvious echoes in today's news pages.

Keith Bruce
The Herald

Review quote:  Behind the voices of observers, witnesses, inmates, wardens, and the stark or tender stories, it is the poet's own voice which finds exact words to let in light.

J.B. Pick
Markings

Review quote:  Pow's vision is both lucid and complex, his treatments sympathetic but judicious, his executions the work of a very deft hand. What you encounter as a reader in Dear Alice is complicity to a point that never trespasses upon realism. Understanding, you are reminded, is only anything like truth within the cell walls of the Self. And madness has a logic very like your own. Read Dear Alice first because it's beautiful, but read it also to learn more about yourself.

Stephen Lackaye
The Edinburgh Review

Review quote:  The elegance and sensitivity makes this sequence [Resistances] the highlight of Dear Alice. When it comes to describing insanity, poetry, it transpires, is a deeply sympathetic medium: the negotiation between words and meanings, the unexpected connections and curious juxtapositions; in life these are marks of madness, but in poetry, they become art.

Sarah Crown
The Times Literary Supplement

Review quote:  This collection is all the stronger for its quiet but clear tone, sometimes with an awareness of potential comedy, but always with respect, finding the exact detail which reveals or gets to the heart of things.

Daisy McKenzie
Northwords Now

Review quote:  [Pow] has captured the imagined speech and thoughts of patients, and treats them with warmth, empathy and great humanity. That's a major accomplishment in itself, but the quality of the poems takes his achievement to a higher level. They are wonderfully realised individual pieces, and the writing is exceptional.

Colin Will
Scottish Poetry Library's Poetry Reader

Previous review quote:  A special attraction of Tom Pow’s poems is they achieve lucidity without dissolving into simplicity and a decorum which has nothing to do with gentility. They say what they say with aesthetic as well as human tact, and present experiences without inflating them or diminishing them. In other words, with truth.

Norman MacCaig

Previous review quote:  … his firm sombre draughtsmanship is masterly…Also he has the gift – very rare – of compressing what could be a full-length novel into a poem of about fifty lines that leaves a Tchechovian after-pang.

George Mackay Brown
The Scotsman

Previous review quote:  … a highly impressive first collection. The assured technique, the distinctive voice and the mature vision are the qualities of a poet who is confident of his powers…Pow has a command of imagery and diction that allow him to conjure up a sense of place, and with it that compound of atmosphere and mood and tone, with apparent effortlessness…combines a disciplined passion for the truth of experience with a delight in the art of poetry.

James Aitchison
The Glasgow Herald

Previous review quote:  This is not an easy or comfortable book: like the rough seas of the title it is entirely readable but always cut with integral unpredictability; like all good seas, that’s where the magic lies. The poem, Rough Seas: Three Postcards, highlights the essences: ‘…for some people Rough Seas can never be/ metaphorical: nor words enshrine their pain’: Tom Pow comes close.

Tom Nairn
The Scottish Literary Journal

Previous review quote:  … has a raw directness that doesn’t let the reader out of his grip. His poetry is rich in texture, full of the sights and sounds of the world, the little things of life, and a genuine sympathy which supplies a truly human touch.

Joy Hendry
The Glasgow Herald

Previous review quote:  This book has a freshness and vigour that have been gifted to a poet who by his technique is able to capture them in significant images…I have been most impressed by this book, by its natural imagery, and its human insight… Sometimes I sense the generous shade of Heaney behind the poems, but Pow has well learned any lessons the master may have taught him. His formal control is masterly, his imagery clear and colourful …

Iain Crichton Smith
The Scotsman

Previous review quote:  I was aware of a mind exploring further, searching for, rather than settling for definitive answers. One of the generous strengths of his work, its accumulating power at this early stage of his career, is that he permits his readers to join him in these explorations and share with him the learning and the daring that is involved.

Hayden Murphy
Lines Review

Previous review quote:  This really is an outstanding collection. I know that in the quiet grove of Poetics, superlatives are relatively common; but The Moth Trap captures and justifies them all.

John Glenday
Northlight

Previous review quote:  With a swashbuckling relish for language, and an intense lyricism allied to delicacy of phrase, Tom Pow’s new poems daringly set events of global significance against moments of startling intimacy, and the vulnerability of childbirth. Masterly evocations of landscape, from Scotland to South America and the Arctic, retain a sense of mystery, a still centre; triumphantly confirming his advocacy of harmony and humanity, and the ‘symmetry of love’, in the face of the howling world surrounding us.

Stewart Conn

Previous review quote:  Pow earns his large conclusions about mortality, love, fear and sacrifice, by giving us the process behind them … This simplicity is never lazy, it is born of effort. Red Letter Day is a very fine collection indeed.

Robyn Marsack
Scotland on Sunday