Lisa Dart

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Lisa Dart was born in Cornwall, but grew up in Orpington, Kent in England. After working for both the Open University and the University of Sussex for many years, she combines writing poetry with her commitment to gifted children as Head of Curriculum Enhancement at St Bede’s School. Her chapbook was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2005 and she was one of the four winners for the USA Grolier Prize 2004. Many of her poems have appeared in British poetry magazines. She has recently completed a doctorate in poetry and philosophy at the University of Sussex.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714452
ISBN:  9781844714452
Author:  Lisa Dart
Title:  The Linguistics of Light
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Apr-09
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 Linguistics of Light journeys from the north Norfolk coast of England across a vast emotional landscape to Greece and beyond.

America is one of the imaginative and physical locations for some of the poems whilst others, for example, “Post-card of a Swan” begin with the small scale, but range in the ancient world and travel through theories of the universe to return to a confined, but comforting place: Einstein’s kitchen on a rainy day.

These poems draw on science, on philosophy and on the bible for insight into our understanding of love, time and memory. Uncalled for, memory seems to: “come, flit land precise//on random things so that moments of the past return again and again and become, in Garra Rock, a kind of blueprint of the future.”

In contrast, some of the sharp blue sunlight of Greece opens other questions of religion and science and, instead of observing a belief in God, the poem’s narrator becomes “observant of the ordinary”; the ordinary life of peasants and goats, but this observation offers a different idea of sacrament, one that leads to an unexpected fusion of science and spirituality in the poem’s final image.

Ordinariness: of traffic, in “Miles from Litlington”; of ironing, in “Winter Afternoon in Hampden Park”, bring us full circle back to the south coast of England and, by so doing, complete the longing expressed in “Derek Jarman’s Garden”. The “shuttered – down, bleached emptiness” of Jarman’s home near Dungeness which opens the whole volume, sets one of its major themes: the longing, both literal and metaphorical, for light.

Light is a predominant theme which resonates in many of the poems, including in the sequence which retell the paintings of the contemporary American painter Edward Hopper. Light, in these poems, can be enticing, compelling, mysterious, or spiritual or as in “Summertime”, even an assault.

Throughout, poems also examine the often intimate, sometimes bewildering, relationship between language and the world, from the simplicity of “The Word” to the disturbing presence of madness, evoked with an equal simplicity, in “Why Words Might Not”, to “The Words to Say it”. This poem, in several parts, presses on the language we use for death, and our understanding of art and imagination. It is the pressure which informs the volume’s title: The Linguistics of Light.

Table of contents:
Derek Jarman’s Garden, Dungeness
First Naming
Eden
Postcard to my Brother
The Quietest Hour
Arkansas Spring
Mother
The Sabbath
Sunday School
The Word
Annunciation
Salome Holding the Head of Saint John the Baptist
Dead Fox
Arkansas in March
Something that Happened
Oxford, Again
Hopper’s Canvas
summertime
couples
Rooms — Sea
Arriving in New York City
House at Dusk
Swans
Maltas Beach
Lilies
Breakfast on Saturday
Why Words Might Not
Even if the Big Questions are Hard to Answer
The Failing Light
Autumn
Salthouse Church
Nightingale
Winter Afternoon in Hampden Park
The Anchor
Remembrance Sunday
Garra Rock
Held
Kispum
Conundrum
Carrion
The Hour of the Wolf
Cobwebs
Between Things
The Words to Say It
My Father’s Tin Box
The Fruit of Poetry
Postcard of a Swan
The Necessity of Judas
Where We Begin
The Words for Home
Summer afternoon at the Cuckmere
Miles from Litlington

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (65 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

My Father's Tin Box
for my father

Every paper that mattered to you,
you filed there, in its rectangular, fire proof,
indestructible cabinet grey.
A reliquary for your life:out of date
insurance numbers, mortgages, bills,
birth certificates, even my school reports
creased with age, and your will —
This box, an archaeologist's find,
with sprung lock that, unfailingly,
snaps shut or flips up may come to me
when you die …

On my way to Santorini this summer
I imagined your tin box —
after a massive earthquake
like the one when the Minoans
were wiped out — as a metal amphora,
strangely buoyant, burning mysteriously,
as if magnesium on the water:a calm
survivor, untouched by the magma's
catastrophic eruption of steam and lava;
and me, your middle daughter,
in that black Aegean cataclysm.

Unpublished endorsement:  Lisa’s poetry is personal without self-absorption, clever without cleverness; her interests lie close to the heart. She writes with the clear eyes and head of an outsider.

Tobias Hill

Unpublished endorsement:  In these powerful poems, Lisa Dart’s concern is with the weight of memory and the way it defines self. Uncalled for, memory seems to ‘come, flit land precise//on random things’ so that moments of the past return again and again and become a kind of ‘blueprint of the future’. Dart’s talent is not only an ability to pinpoint such truths, but also to articulate them vividly. The poems are neither forced nor overly philosophical; instead each presents a stunning moment from a lived life in eloquent language that penetrates our own.

Andrea Hollander Budy

Unpublished endorsement:  The Self in the Photograph is a… perfectly polished gem, where ‘the self’ is explored not just through self absorption or endless introspection, but in terms of the fragility of memory, the everyday oddities an acute eye and ear will perceive, without shouting or fuss.

Catherine Smith
poetry editor The New Writer

Unpublished endorsement:  The poems we heard were accessible but not simple; they were based on personal emotion but not confessional; that essayed exquisite yet exact descriptions of nature germane to her themes of love, death, meaning, memory and self; that were modest but with secret ambition to get to you; and that were written in technically accomplished free (mostly) verse. She unfailingly convinces you of her sincerity and of the pressure she feels to mediate experiences.

Jeffrey Carson