Anne Berkeley

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Biographical note:  Anne Berkeley was born in Ludlow and grew up in Lincolnshire. Her pamphlet The buoyancy aid and other poems was published by Flarestack in 1997, and a selection of her work appeared in Oxford Poets 2002 (Carcanet). She won the TLS prize in 2000 and was a prizewinner in the Arvon competition in 2004. She edited Rebecca Elson's acclaimed posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet, 2001) and is currently editor of the poetry journal Seam. She is one of the poetry group Joy of Six, with whom she has performed across the UK and in New York.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714223
ISBN:  9781844714223
Author:  Anne Berkeley
Title:  The Men from Praga
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This sharp and unpredictable collection opens in the Cold War. Berkeley’s father was a V-bomber navigator, a conflicted inheritance of pride and guilt which informs the opening poems. While parents struggle to keep life normal, the secrecies and occluded horrors of the period play out in vividly imagined children’s games. One locus of memory is a ruined mansion, sliced into many apartments, through which the adult narrator looks back on the past unsure of what really happened, only that the child did not understand.

The second part of the book develops the theme of shared humanity from the Warsaw fishermen of the title poem to a hi-tech dystopia of the near future, by way of a dissolute Norwegian, a traduced Baudelaire, a contemporary woodwose, and a petrolhead on the A1M.

The array of voices – boastful, baffled, sardonic – employs Berkeley’s experience as a poetry performer with The Joy of Six. In poems that frequently wrongfoot the reader, the Empire shrinks to an opera audience, the Royal Family is reduced to waxworks, and Cambridge finally gets its ecological mass transportation system. Obliquely political, this debut collection takes a sideways look at modern England.

Table of contents:
I Co-ordinates
Hold-all (Aircrew)
Vapour Trail
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Flat 9
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
The Old Arboretum
My Mother’s Migraines
Small Arms
Russkis
The Americans
The Balcony
Downstairs
Olympus Mk 301
Night Sky in October
Bunker
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
II Trajectories
The Men from Praga
River
A Portrait of V Nubiola
Boots
Thirsty
Accident
Taking the Air
Advice from Nils
Nils Takes a Breather
Baudelaire’s Pipe
A Change in the Weather
Vacant Possession
Matthew Crampton
Pauahi Crater 10 a.m.
Between the Twenty-sixth and the Twenty-seventh Floors
Chattel
Britannia
They
One Way of Listening to Windchimes
Food for Scandal
Gasometer
Great Lettuce in The Botanic Garden
My Backyard
Landless
Chamber of Horrors #2 Extra
The Cambridge Metro

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Excerpt from book:  

Yellow Sun, Green Grass

When I lived in my father’s house
The Bomb was mighty and ruled over the earth
And the Bomb was a mystery
And my father was its servant
And the names of the Bomb were secret and unspoken

The Bomb was in the sky and came down to earth
To bring peace to the world

And these were some of the names of the Bomb in those
      days: Blue Danube, Green Grass, Yellow Sun, Red Snow
And they were forbidden to be spoken
And the Bomb was hidden

The Government praised the Bomb
And the people made sacrifices
For the Bomb gave us strength
For the Bomb kept us safe

And those who cursed the Bomb gave succour to our enemies
And we despised them

When the Bomb went forth the earth trembled and the
       heavens were rent
And the heavens wept
And the Bomb would come again

I lived in fear of the Bomb
I dreamed I lived and looked on the terrible face of the Bomb

Unpublished endorsement:  Anne Berkeley's poems manage to seem unnervingly direct while coming at you from the most unexpected angles. Whether evoking a childhood lived in the shadow of the Bomb or the skewed reality of a waxworks museum these poems take a clear-eyed look at the world in all its strangeness.

Matthew Francis

Unpublished endorsement:  Whether via sound-effects ("the swallowing blue of a million delphiniums"), exact images ("the wall was speckled green, like ice-cream in the gutter") or that assurance with facts that convinces a reader ("gold a micron thick laminates the glass"), Anne Berkeley's writing has immediacy. She says it, you see it.

Sheenagh Pugh