Tim Atkins

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Biographical note:  Tim Atkins is the author of Folklore 1-25, To Repel Ghosts, 25 Sonnets, and Horace. Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UEL, editor of the online poetry magazine onedit, and translator of Petrarch, Horace, and Buddhist texts, he is a Buddhist, husband, poet, and father. He is a happy man.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714193
ISBN:  9781844714193
Author:  Tim Atkins
Title:  Folklore
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Oct-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:  Stretching from Anglo-Saxon fragments, through the Shakespeare of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ecstatic lyrics of John Clare, elegiac minimalism of AE Houseman, and contemporary work of Geoffrey Hill Folklore is a poetic sequence which extends, challenges, and continues the tradition of writing about the English countryside.

In this ecstatic, dreamlike, and starkly realist poem sequence set in and around the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, the poet is discovered through the voices of all that surround him; giving truth to the French poet Rimbaud’s claim that “I is an other”.

In Folklore the poet is made by love of language as much as by the external world, and it is by singing through the unknown self and the unfamiliar world that identity – always fleeting, always peculiar, always ecstatic – is born: these poems are far from simple and bucolic. They echo the language and concerns of the aforementioned writers while at the same time playing with the innovative and modern poetic breakthroughs of the likes of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. They are poems of living language, which are constantly in a state of becoming and redefining the possibilities of both word and Worcestershire world order.

Folklore speaks of a world that is both global and local. It is the world of the imagination and the world of the evolving English countryside. It is a work where the geography of the imagination is as vibrant as the one before the author’s eyes; and the one beneath his feet.

Table of contents:
Folklore

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14.

Sees raindrops in the air and flies between them. Bees and all. Women. Or. The insides of gilly-flowers. The chestnut’s white cone. Jasmines. Card side. Climbs down the neck and takes her pollen takes it. Flies in a straight line & hides her insides. Covered in honey, pollen, comb. Is a language if.

This mouth built her. All the teeth frames its paper. Talking swarms—you were—Holding your breasts in your hands for the stings. How they swarm in all. Bleeding. Gone dark with or poison. As all falls to the floor.

Liquids lost in the body (sleeping) creatures dream of you. Dream of you.

Your black pins.

Previous review quote:  At a time when so many poems read as unnecessary and under-motivated by-products of decidedly other careers, the guilelessness, amusement and scantily-clad affect of Atkins’ Horace is both a balm and a tonic. If Atkins were Horace, someone (Harry Gilonis? Chris Hamilton-Emery?) would have given him a villa well over 20 years ago.

Miles Champion
The Poetry Project Newsletter

Previous review quote:  Tim Atkins does for translation what Gertrude Stein did for nouns.

Lisa Jarnot

Previous review quote:  When I heard some of these poems in Tim Atkins’ voice I was instantly interested and amused: my pleasure and enjoyment have continued, reading them.

Tom Raworth

Previous review quote:  This is the finest long poem to come out of Britain.

Michael Gizzi

Previous review quote:  Tim Atkins’ debut (Folklore) is one of the most promising I have fallen for for many years. It's not clear to me what the overall shape is of the sequence of which these rural prose pieces are parts, but at this point every piece leaves you wanting more than it says and the cumulative effect is quite entrancing. We are facing a poet of resolution and sensibility. This is truly lyric poetry in a landscape where almost everyone else is didactic. The setting is resonant not only of Piers Plowman (quoted in the colophon) but of A.E. Housman and John Masefield, however, the conduct of the text resolutely avoids literalness to preserve a sense of absolute space, as an abstract painting wipes out recession and numerical space but opens an edgeless plane which engulfs us and so is space in the pure form. Like Piers, it is autobiographical and yet non-realistic. The text becomes progressively less explicit, exploiting the cumulation of context.

Andrew Duncan